Pick Me, Honey!

At a Glance:All contact is lost with the colony on Manticore-3 and a platoon of Colonial Marines is dispatched to investigate. Major McMillan is a veteran of the Pan-Asian campaign and he assumes he has seen it all. When the dropship goes skids-down on Manticore-3 everything changes. The colonists have been overrun by some sort of twisted parody of mankind with huge night-vision eyes and the ability to spray acid or dissolve through composite armor with a blast from their biocannon. McMillan finds his small force outmatched and surrounded and they plan on dying with honor and courage until their Weyland-Yutani android discovers a way out that might just save the survivors. Language: English text and the haunting moans of the cephalomorphs. Sexual Content: Completely uncensored action as the unwitting marines are torn apart by the alien monstrosities. Available From: J-List!

This is a good view of the cephalomorph's cranial anatomy just prior to an attack.Operation Samurai AAR: We arrived in orbit around Manticore-3 aboard the light cruiser Sacher-Masoch and the corpsicles auto-thawed by 0300 local. Corporal Meyer had some freezer burn so I had the medical android Curly check him out and administer anti-cryo injections. Stretching, chow, and cleanup were taken care of by 0500 so I began the briefing in bay 7. The op was a simple recon drop. Squads one and two were assigned to insert via dropship into the shuttle bay on the Manticore-3 colony. I would accompany them in the prowler. Squads three and four under Lt. Carlyle were assigned to the other dropship and would fly air cover unless we needed reinforcements.

Mission go was 0700 local and I wanted our sweep completed by 0900. Make contact with the colonists or ascertain what had happened by downloading logs from the central core. If there was no one to chit-chat with and the logs came up with nothing orders were to evac back to the Sacher-Masoch and remain in orbit until we received further instructions. A bad transmitter was my best guess. No reason for the commies to want a dump like Manticore-3.

The dropships launched at 0701 and we began atmospheric entry. Light turbulence, a little more cloud cover than I would have liked, but otherwise textbook. We made a flyby of the colony and the lights were on but Spasky couldn't get anyone on the short range. We touched down at 0707 and Carlyle's ship took up a low cover patrol. Lighting was inadequate so we went to IR and relied on the motion trackers going in. I moved the prowler up to provide cover for squad one while they were making their entry. The shuttle bay doors were locked down so Sgt. Rodriguez opted for a demo charge to pop the lid. This put a hole in the door but I had to give it a little encouragement with the prowler because the SFCs (editorial note: corps slang meaning "stupid fucking colonists") had piled a bunch of debris on the other side. Not a good sign if they were trying to keep something out.

I had squad one leapfrog their way in as fire teams and kept squad two with me at the prowler to secure the entrance. Rodriguez reported signs of a firefight, but all of the fire seemed to be coming from the colonists defending the complex. No sign of commie casings, shell damage, or anything else to make me think the reds were behind the assault. Corporal Finn also reported seeing some heat or acid scoring on the walls and discovered that a portion of the floor had been dissolved through three levels. I told them to give it a wide berth but Curly insisted on collecting samples.

Squad one reached objective one (shuttle control) at 0714 with little incident and a major sense of foreboding. Finn sliced their bay computers and opened the vehicle doors so that I could move the prowler and squad two into position at objective two (medlab). Squad one finished securing objective one and then moved to consolidate with us in the medlab. We made a sweep of that and there were some interesting discoveries. We found the remains of some partially-dissolved colonists and preserved samples of what looked like human babies with giant eyes, tiny mouth parts, and weird prehensile vaginas. I detailed squad two with setting up a perimeter while I had Finn and his fire team try to work out the situation with the colony's central core.

About that time I got a call from Carlyle on the taccom and he said he was seeing movement in the perimeter. Our dropship had already dusted off and returned to the Sacher-Masoch on auto. Carlyle told me he was going to come in low for a closer look and then all I hear is this screaming and moaning in a weird language followed by what I can only describe as wet slapping sounds. A second later there was a terrible crash and all of my bio-monitors for squads three and four flatlined. Something had brought down our backup dropship.

Framegrab from Murdoch's taccam recovered from the prowler's datalog.I had Rodriguez take his fire team back to the shuttle pads to search for survivors and I shifted the squad one perimeter around medlab to give them as much cover from the entrance as possible. Rodriguez found the wreckage of the dropship in a hurry and I could see from their taccams that the ship was covered in some sort of secreted resin. Secreted from what, I don't know, but I had flashes of that distended vagina in the specimen jars. Murdoch, the smart gunner in Rodriguez's squad, reported that he had spotted some movement. "Looks like a colonist" he said, and I could see from his taccam that it did look like a colonist with her head down.

Then she lifted her head and for a split second I got a glimpse of the adult or young-adult version of that monster in the specimen tank in medlab. There was a hideous moan followed more of that horrible wet slapping sound. Murdoch went flatline before he even got a shot off and Rodriguez ordered a fall back to the perimeter. I will never forget her eyes looming up in front of Murdoch like that. Then the screaming and shooting. Rodriguez never made it back to the entrance. I just saw blurs on the taccams and I wasn't about to sacrifice our perimeter when the shit seemed to be hitting the fan in a serious fashion.

A few seconds later she - it - was at the perimeter. I got my first good look at how she did her killing from the unfortunate perspective of private Kozlowski. With an inhuman screech she spun around, flipping up her dainty skirt (editorial note: dissection of recovered specimens in WY lab later revealed the skirt was actually a flap of tissue not unlike an eyelid in a human) and revealing that hideous vagina. It yawned open like the mouth to hell and there was a moist sound like a fruit roll-up being peeled from its backing. Then Kozlowski was flatlined.

Luckily for the rest of squad two I was able to bring the prowler around and run the damn thing down before it could get its pussy on anyone else. I took a good hit to the transaxle in the process and the prowler was pretty much stationary from that point on. Curly recovered some tissue samples, but it was difficult because her damn carcass was eating through the floor.

I put Finn in charge of what was left of squad one and ordered squad two to consolidate on the medlab and use the auto-turrets for fire support. Finn couldn't slice the colony's data core from the medlab, the only way in was the colony's central core almost a kilometer away inside the colony's primary housing tower. Sgt. Ambone from squad two was my second after Rodriguez bought the farm so I told him to organize a volunteer patrol. Some members in his squad were less than enthusiastic about this but Ambone put the fear of Chesty Puller into them. I decided to go in with Ambone's volunteers, leaving Ambone with the rest of his squad to secure medlab. It was a mistake to do something like that, but we were short on men and I know my way around a pulse rifle as good as any grunt.

Cephalomorph feeding habits are believed to be like that of a terran fly; pre-digestion through regurgitated fluids.The patrol consisted of myself, Curly, Finn, Dietrich, Moonhower, and Crenshaw. Crenshaw was on the incinerator so he took point. About two hundred meters into the housing tower we started seeing signs of the work the creatures had been doing; weird wallscrolls and posters with pictures of these monsters on them. All of it was stuck up with this slimy yellow crap. I told the patrol not to touch anything. Finn was a little bit sassy so I told him to secure his shit. Then we started finding the colonists. Just a few at first, but eventually they were cocooned to the walls all over the place. Their guts had been burst open and something had come out.

Dietrich found one of the things, just chopping cabbage like a robot in an old lounge. He tried to bring her down without shooting. I told Crenshaw to get the incinerator around but it was too late. Her vagina blasted Dietrich with some sort of acid and he started shooting wildly, clipping Curly in the process. The creature dropped prone and spread its legs just as Crenshaw opened up with the incinerator. He got it but not before the damn thing pulped him with a dead one blast of goo that ate through him like a skinny Japanese guy at a hotdog eating contest.

Curly managed to get Dietrich's armor off before the damage was too bad and I was able to get him back on the smart gun without too much complaining. We were approaching the central core when reports started rolling in that Ambone was under attack in the medlab. Apparently the damn things were able to spray acid from glands in their chest as well and they had laid waste to the turrets and broken into the perimeter. Ambone's unit was torn to ribbons. The few survivors fended off the attack but then they made the mistake of trying to capture one of the things. I don't know what it was, something about the way they looked made some of the marines crazy. Ambone ordered the acid sprayers secured with fiberglass rags but the thing wriggled out of their control and killed the rest of the poor bastards.

By this point in the mission everyone but Curly wanted to bug out, but without a dropship we didn't really have a way out of the complex. Our best bet was to die like marines. Complete the mission, transmit the data from the core computer to the ship in orbit, and then hope the next poor bastards listened to the message on our answering machine before trying another insertion. Before I could calm the men down and verbalize this fatalistic notion two of the things attacked us with their damn vaginas, laying down a withering barrage of goop that nearly took me full in the face. Dietrich went completely apeshit, hammering them with his smartgun and just standing there and taking hits from their noxious vaginas. He went down, but he dragged them with him into hell. That left me, Finn, Moonhower, and Curly.

The creatures sometimes seemed to use pheremones to provoke the marines to attempt a capture with inevitably disastrous results.The entryway into the central core was blocked with more of the damn wall scrolls, so Finn sliced us a terminal and found a way through ventilation into the data core. We were about halfway there when the creatures started piling into the shaft after us. Moonhower took out a grenade and told us to get a move on. I wasn't about to argue with her. We made it to the core just as the fireball raced down that ventilation shaft. I would like to recommend PFC. Janice Moonhower for the WY Medal of Honor (editorial note: request sealed pending classified follow up operations on Manticore-3) for saving our asses by sacrificing herself.

I would have scrubbed the mission earlier had I known what was waiting for us in the data core. Not one or two, but five of the damn things, dressed up in some mockery of wedding dresses (editorial note: again, biological in nature, believed to be 'queen potentials' prior to ingesting royal jelly and expressing of reproductive traits). Finn and I put it to them with our pulse rifles but the rapid-fire they were returning was intense. Curly pointed out a cooling duct overhead that was full of Aspecene gel at nearly absolute zero. I popped a 30mm grenade into it and the gel dropped right on top of them. They screamed this unearthly horrible death rattle and then they collapsed in a heap. Finn sliced the core, got the colonial records, and we made our way back towards medlab.

Curly noted that if we fought our way to the transmit tower in the shuttle bay instead of the one in medlab he could remote-pilot the dropship back down to us. We decided on this course of action. I'm sorry to say that Finn was taken by the creatures in our efforts to make it to the shuttle bay, dragged off into a floor duct. Curly managed to grab the core dump before they hauled Finn off and we made it to the shuttle bay. Curly piloted the dropship in and we escaped back to the Sacher-Masoch. I would have liked to nuke the colony from orbit to be sure no one else falls prey to its trap, but ever since that SNAFU on LV-426 we haven't been allowed to carry tacnukes on our cruisers.

I have filed a recommendation with high command that an orbital bombardment be conducted of the colony at the nearest opportunity.

Mission Difficulty Assessment: This was supposed to be a cakewalk and once again I blame colonial intelligence for not providing adequate information. There have been several instances where it seems to me that marine detachments have been used as guinea pigs to examine alien life forms. The colonists are the cheese and we're the rats in the maze. In the future I would suggest all lost-contact reports are addressed with regimental sized deployments, full armored support, and multiple orbital gunships in the event that the mission needs to be scrubbed.

Defining Moment: This mission really began to fall apart from the moment that we lost squads three and four and their dropship. The loss of half of my mission assets hamstrung my ability to aggressively pursue the objective while maintaining a safe egress point.

Weyland-Yutani Internal Assessment: These creatures, termed cephalomorphs because of their unusual brain and skull characteristics, represent an extremely potent and as-yet untapped resource for our biowarfare division. I recommend a second mission be prepared for Mantricore-3 to recover living specimens of the creatures by any means necessary. Consider all colonial marine assets to be expendable and include a full corporate advisory panel and several loyal androids to ensure that the mission goes better than the one on LV-426.

Each category in the rating system is based out of a possible -10 score (-10 being the worst). The overall score is based out of a possible -50 score (-50 being the worst).

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