I urged myself. I have to stop that beacon. The Krell were everywhere. The Shard were here to destroy their very habitat: there was no point in retreating, in trying to defend against the onslaught. They poured from the coral hives, from the destroyed trees. Bounded across the dead jungle. I joined them, bouncing onwards with my battle-suit’s enhanced-mobility pack firing regularly: making speed on the platform. Soon, a hundred Krell were at my back. Racing as a tide, as a bloody-minded swarm lurching up the side of the structure: crushing each other in a collective wish to reach the summit. As many Krell bodies were strewn across the jungle floor as consumed by the Shard swarm. I looked up at the immense distance I had to clear. The range-finder on my wrist-comp – unreliable, but the best guess I had in the circumstances – suggested that the structure was already a kilometre tall, and still rising. I was never going to make it using my thruster. Then I looked back at the Krell, at the seething mass of alien bodies moving up the side of the structure.
