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continued to descend towards the freighter’s deck. “Trix, you’re out first. Take head shots with the armor-piercing mag and then swing around so Morland and Hsiung can exit the other side.”
    “Copy.”
    “I’ll be right behind you.” Miller unlatched his belts and an alarm sounded in the cockpit. “I suspect body shots won’t do shit to these things, given how much blubber they’ve got,” he said. “Head shots and eye shots. You all got that?”
    They all responded in the affirmative.
    “Okay, Smitty. Take us down.”
    “What the hell does it look like I’m doing?” he barked back.
    The chopper banked hard to the right and hovered lower. Below, the tusk-fiends scattered. Then, as if thinking better of it, the animals stopped their retreat and surged forward, flopping headfirst in ripples of blubber with remarkable speed toward the helipad.
    The chopper was quickly surrounded by the creatures, and a number of the fiends disappeared directly underneath them. Smitty cursed over his headset and pulled back on the stick, raising the chopper back into the air.
    By way of reply, du Trieux unlatched her restraints and opened her door, turning the interior of the chopper into a storm of wind and dust.
    Taking aim at the creatures on deck, du Trieux hung out the chopper door and took several shots with her Gilboa. The first two grazed a pair of fiends, but she hit the third—a mist of red splattering into the wind as the armor-piercing round struck brain matter. After another two kill shots, she’d cleared a space on the right near the bow of the freighter by the mast head.
    “There!” she pointed.
    Smitty yanked the stick of the chopper, banking hard and tipping du Trieux in her seat as she dangled out her door.
    Du Trieux and Miller exited the chopper seconds after touching down, bullets flying.
    The tusk-fiends lurched backwards away from them, while the creatures on the other side of the chopper surged forward. Working her way around the helicopter, du Trieux took shot after shot, wounding some of the pinnipeds—which Miller finished with his M27—and killing others with a single shot through the eye.
    Once the deck was sufficiently cleared, Morland and Hsiung exited the bird, swinging around to the back to prevent any of the fiends from running into, and possibly damaging, the tail rotor.
    When the onslaught of creatures finally slowed, Smitty shut down the chopper and joined du Trieux and Miller on the right, wounding stragglers with his sidearm and cursing like a sailor with every shot.
    As the rotors slowed and the echoes of gunfire ceased, Miller counted the heads of his team and lowered his M27. He’d gone through an entire clip of ammo, but they were all still upright and the fiends had stopped coming. That had to count for something.
    Once the main deck was deemed secured, Miller, Smitty, and the team searched the bodies for survivors. There were none. Given the look of them, some hadn’t even had their weapons drawn. It stood to logic that the tusk-fiends had climbed aboard the freighter and surprised the crew. Their bodies were crushed, and most were missing limbs and chunks of flesh, as if the creatures had grabbed them by the arm, and flopped right over the top of them, crushing them under their two-meter-long, multi-ton bodies, and then had a nibble.
    After the team swung around the perimeter to remove any more tusk-fiends, they headed up the iron stairwell toward the bridge, but just past the chart room, a different kind of corpse blocked the walkway.
    The thing was enormous. Just slightly shorter than the fiends, the animal looked half-hippopotamus and half-dog, with a pronounced underbite. Miller had never seen a creature like it before—although the tusk-fiends obviously had. It looked as if the fiends had torn chunks from this corpse, too.
    “Never seen these before either,” Morland said, looking over Miller’s shoulder. “Anybody want to name it before Miller does?”
    “It