The Dreizhen Chainsword Massacre [✱26]

Posted on Wed Aug 12th, 2026 @ 1:31am by Ramielos Volsunga & Captain Nema
Edited on on Wed Aug 12th, 2026 @ 1:31am

1,788 words; about a 9 minute read

Mission: UnderMind [4]
Location: Faraday Crash Site, Dreizhen III
Timeline: After 'The Missing, Part 3'

"I trust you to use your judgement appropriately." Captain Rovak had said.

Now, the crash site of USS Faraday was below him. Warrior bugs swarmed, piles of their carcasses stacked high outside the only hole they'd been able to punch in its hull. Another of the flamethrowing tank-bugs emerged from the sand. Volsunga knew this was the time to apply his judgement. He was only a few hundred meters up, the cooling systems they'd installed in his suit allowed him to survive re-entry, and his exaggerations about the survivability of a straight fall had meant he'd been allowed to proceed.

He released the parachute, and the harness fell away from him. He went down, straight down, hard. He directed himself accurately, smashing into the head of the flamethrower bug just as it prepared to release another stream of liquid flame on the Faraday's hull. He felt the plates of its armour crunch underfoot, and just to be sure, once he'd regained his balance, he took his chainsword and plunged it downward, before dragging it forward, causing the great monstrosity to slump forward.

He ran down the collapsing edifice of it, charging into the crowd of screeching bugs, chainsword drawn. He span into them with ferocity, halving a trio of the nearest creatures at the jaw. Another that turned to him soon met the teeth of his blade and was torn apart by it. The swarm now knew of him, directing teeth and jaws towards him, but their natural weapons were no contest for 40,000 years of technology, and his ceramite armour, even the metallic joints in it, were immune to their strikes. A dozen. Two dozen. Ten. Whether with foot, fist or chainsword, he killed the creatures in droves, and it was glorious.

Around ten metres away from the Faraday, another flamethrower bug began to emerge.

He felt a rumbling his suit's sensors confirmed, something was digging its way through the ground. Another of the tank bugs emerged, alongside dozens more of the warriors. The creature arced its head back and sparks formed between the ignition antennae on its head, it prepared to spray another jet of flame, but before it could complete the process Volsunga took his plasma pistol and fired a shot that cored the thing from face to rear, causing it to slump immediately dead.

The plasma pistol's coils wound down with a whine he could feel through the gauntlet, and the overheat icon on his retinal display shifted from amber to a deeper red, telling him he had perhaps two more shots before the weapon would be unsafe to fire, and perhaps thirty seconds of cooldown if he wanted it to last the day; he noted the number, filed it in the same place he filed the tally of dead at his feet, and slotted the pistol back into its mag-clamp on his thigh, drawing the chainsword up into a two-handed grip as the second tanker's corpse began to settle into the sand.

The swarm parted around the falling bulk of its kindred the way water parts around a dropped stone, and through the brief gap it made Volsunga saw, for the first time since his descent, the breach in the Faraday's flank, a ragged mouth of torn alloy and buckled deck plating framed by every carcass fallen in a pile against it, the corpses stacked three, four high in places, frozen mid-rictus with their barbed forelimbs still reaching for the gap they had died trying to widen.

Beyond that barricade of carcasses, in the dull flicker of what he took to be emergency lighting, he saw movement, green camouflage shoulders moving behind a secondary forcefield barricade the crew had erected inside the breach itself, poised behind. They could see him, he sensed. But they had not expected him. Perhaps they had been among those had had fought when he first arrived, and they feared him.

He acknowledged them anyway with a long glance, and began to move.

The warrior bugs came at him in ones and threes now, as if the swarm had decided that the loss of two tankers warranted a change of tactic, and he gave them his attention in the same economical way he gave his boots to the sand, killing two of the nearest with a single backhanded sweep that took them across the thorax and left them in pieces that still twitched against his greaves, kicking a third in the joint where the carapace thinned to chitin and feeling the leg buckle inward as the thing went down shrieking into a stain on the sand.

One of the fliers, the first he had seen up close, launched itself at the side of his helm from somewhere he could not place, and after he regined his balance against the frenzied attack of the thing holding onto his head, he caught it one-handed out of the air, ceramite fingers closing around its thorax, and crushed it as a man might crush an empty ration tin, letting the offal drop at the next step. His sensorium logged a small weight against his pauldron from another hopper strike that had bounced off without penetrating; he made a note to praise the artificers and continued forward.

He was within five metres of the corpse barricade when the rumbling returned, and this time his suit's tremor-sense painted it in simple lines across his lens as a shape, a long, sinuous thing moving underground from the direction of a low ridge perhaps two hundred metres off the port quarter of the crash. The reading was faint. He could not yet tell whether what was coming was another tanker, or some unforeseen thing they had held in reserve for an opponent of his calibre.

He filed that too, beside the pistol and the tally, and decided not to wait to find out which the ridge would give him.
The disturbance under the sand burst open at once, and rather than being any single entity, it was a dense swarm of the warriors, hundreds upon hundreds all at once. They charged at Volsunga quicker than he could cut them down, and soon they were upon him. At first he could continue to resist them and sever limbs and jaws with the chainsword, but they bugs had begun to stack themselves upon him, to swarm him the way he had read some of the bees of Earth did to an invader. Though they did not vibrate to overheat him like the bee, as they piled higher and higher atop one another, he felt his limbs turn to stone. He could no longer manipulate his sword for the weight of them, and whatever he grabbed to crush was either already severed or of no value to whatever it belonged to.

He felt his centre of gravity shift, and amidst the chitinous tide he was swept slowly off his feet. Stabbing, biting and slashing continued against him in vain, and even those bugs closest to him seemed to be crushed against the solidity of him and the weight of their brood. Even the weakest points of his armour kept him immune from them, but he could not move his arm to swing his sword or retrieve his plasma pistol, and the teeth of the blade ran in vain. He knew there was no further option open to him. Perhaps all he could do was wait for them to lose interest or starve.

His helmet HUD warned him of a sudden energy spike he could not see, apparently in his proximity. Then another he saw the golden light of, faintly through the gaps in warrior bodies. Then a third from nearby, and suddenly his limbs had some limited freedom, though it was still like moving through drying ferrocrete. He retrieved his pistol and let off a handful of shots that further shifted the pile, and soon he could swing his sword.

The light of the sun returned to his vision, and he ploughed the corpses aside as he escaped the pile. In the direction of the Faraday, he saw the origin of his salvation. Starfleet marines with heavy phaser weapons, led by the Orca Captain Nema in her heavy legged battlesuit. It almost reminded him of his own armour.

“Thanks for the assist. We thought maybe you could use a hand, too. You okay?” Nema’s voice told and asked him over the comm.

“You have my gratitude. I am unharmed. I did not want to have to wait for them to fall asleep to continue dispatching them.” Volsunga said.

“Bandits at six and eight oclock!” One of the marines called out, and Nema’s heavy weapons team quickly dispatched the half-dozen or so flying bugs that came at them in a volley of phaser fire, well before they reached striking distance.

“Your weapons are effective. My plasma pistol can bring them down easily, but it isn’t designed to be used against these kinds of numbers." Volsunga told them.

Nema turned to the engineer Traego. "Traego, head back in and retrieve my spare phaser cannon attachment. Remove the grip and set the trigger for non-standard pressure interface." The Marine nodded and disappeared back inside, returning only two minutes later with the weapon described, still in the process of removing the grip and resetting the trigger interface.

"If you can use it without crushing it, this should service you. The settings can be changed with the interface on top. It's already set for single shot on a setting strong enough to kill the warriors." Nema said, gesturing for Traego to offer it to Volsunga.

He took the weapon and inspected it. It was not like anything he had handled, but it made sense to him. He fired a shot into the distance, and his helmet HUD began to calibrate itself to the weapon. "It is not our way to use weapons not created by the artificers. But it will suffice."

"Looks like you're doing well enough on your own. We have a saying in the Marine Corps; better to have a gun and not need it than need a gun and not have it." Nema told him. "But, remember, it's a tool, not just a weapon. More than a few Starfleet officers owe their lives to the utility of these things."

"Captain, detecting seismic activity. We've got more bugs coming our way. Emergence point 500 metres that way." Another of the marines said, pointing to four o'clock to indicate.

Volsunga equipped the cannon to the maglock on his back set aside for his boltrifle. He draw his chainsword once more, and charged towards the bugs that burst through the surface. "For Fenris and the All-Father!" He cried as the marines fired around him.

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