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“Twenty-nine left.”

     Corporal Miller put five more shots into the side of the van where the seeker had taken refuge. Rifle held ready, she approached the door.

     “Twenty-four,” it announced, from somewhere in the darkness on the other side of the room.

     The warehouse was the worst possible place to make a stand: plenty of concealment, but nothing the seeker couldn’t simply vault. Tripwires might have kept it from approaching, but Campbell had been carrying the Claymores. It might have been picked off at a distance under infra-red, but the only set of goggles had been lost with Brooks.

     The corrugated steel roof groaned as the seeker clawed its way across it. Miller swung the rifle up, caught the tail in the barrel-mounted light, and put a trio of holes in the metal as she struggled to keep the creature in her sights.

     It dropped to the floor once more: “Twenty-one.”

     Miller put her back to one of the vast, pulsating spires that the seekers had installed to serve their ships from the water main and switched the gun to fully automatic. A protracted battle wouldn’t do her any favours. The seeker could afford to hold her here, to wait for reinforcements, but she had none.

     She scanned the corridor of boxes – left, right, left again – watching for any sign of movement. Suddenly, she caught a glimmer of an eye reflected in the torchlight, just barely peeking around a corner. Charging forward with a yell, she let loose a hail of fire, kicking beads of polystyrene into the air.

     But as she rounded the corner, the seeker was not there.

     “Three,” it whispered in her ear.

     Two more shots – instinctively – as it vanished between the shelves, taking her sidearm with it.

     “One.”

     She switched the rifle back to semi-automatic.

     A flash of movement by the back wall.

     She took the shot.

     “Zero.”

     Calmly, the seeker stepped out into the torchlight. It released the magazine from the pistol and dropped it, then ejected the one remaining round from the chamber. It dropped the pistol too.

     “Seven years since we came to this world. In seven years we have reshaped its continents, siphoned its oceans, made its air our own. Yet still you struggle.”

     It approached, long claws held ready, its mouth nothing more than a fixed concavity of squirming antennae. Its eyes gleamed dimly, set into short protrusions that jutted like antlers from its head.

     A membrane set into its throat flickered as it spoke again: “In seven years have you learned nothing? Has your species not advanced at all?”

     Corporal Miller put five rounds in the seeker’s chest. It crumpled to the ground.

     “Magazine capacity’s a little higher than it was.”