"Christ, there's too many of them!" "Hold them off!" "What are they!" "I don't know, they look like Splinters!" God damn it, Brioni, hold the line! "I can't, there's too many!" Hold the line! "They're in!" HOLD THE DAMN LINE! "Oh god, get it off me, GET IT OFF ME!" Jenkins, help him out! "Jenkins is dead, sir!" Shit, he was the last medic! "I'm out of ammo!" Marines, equip bayonets! "Sir, that's suicide!" We won't surrender to these things! What the hell-where's Johnson! Dammit Johnson, you slime, get back here-Augh!

It played over and over in my mind, like a fuzzy tape recording that endlessly rewound itself over and over again, each time more vivid than the last. My team was slaughtered, my body mortally wounded, and my ship...well, God knows what had happened to my ship. God knows what had happened to me, all I could remember was getting attacked by one of those...those things, and then going out like a light. What were they? They looked and acted like Splinters, but they were so damn hard to kill, their natural armor more resilient and their speed increased almost two fold. And they came out of nowhere, literally. A whole swarm of them simply appeared as soon as I had turned my back, each with it's own little cloud like thing of what looked like a physical manifestation of shadow.They were black, three pronged and pissed, their eyes a weird, orange and yellow mass of dots, orbs and misshapen blobs. They attacked with a primal fury and aggressiveness not usually bourne out of the small creatures. There's another thing, they were bigger. Much bigger.

I couldn't see, I couldn't hear, and I couldn't move. For anyone, that would be a major hindrance. But for a Marine, it was terror. No, a Marine was never scared, But the icy cold hand offear still gripped my heart in a vice. I could be in a coma, still lying on the groung immobile, left for dead. If either those twisted Splinters or the Space Pirates found me, I would be dead. If not, I would waste away over a five day period, my life support systems keeping me alive until I died of starvation, trapped in my own mind. But wait, what was that...faint sounds, fuzzy, like I was wearing earplugs. And my sight began to return, although only mere variations of light and dark and the picture grainy, like a black and white television with the sharpness turned down to zero.

Sounds were more distinguishable now, the crackling of fire. Wait a second, Fire! The ship! But I heard other sounds, including the sound of some beam weapon being fired, a few small explosions, the death squeal of a...Splinter!

My mind snapped up, fully alert, and my sight returned to a degree. I no longer saw blotches of black and white, but full color pictures, though only more . Indeed, the strange, Splinter-like creatures had returned, only in smaller numbers than before. But this time, they were preoccupied with someone, or something else.

My vison slid into focus, a drunk man going sober. There was some robotic, humanoid creature engaged in combat with the Dark Splinters (as I later classified them, my team was apparently the first to encounter their kind in all of humanity)and actually appeared to have the upper hand. It's armor/skin was tinted various shades of vibrant orange and yellow, and it's shape was curved to fit the contours of what looked the body of a human female. Not even the most skilled military technicians could create such armor, we had not the materials. I raised my weapon, letting the computerized locking system plugged into my spinal cord via a hole drilled into the back of my neck do the aiming, and-wait a second, the targeting reticle was gone! In fact, the whole of my HUD was absent from my visor.

It took me a while to recognize the hole on my face plane, right in front of my right eye, the breach in my visor the reason of my lack of a targeting system. Oh well, I suppose my natural aim would have to do...

Meanwhile, the creature was obliterating the Dark Splinters with some kind of beam weapon similar to Space Pirate technology. But her weapon didn't look like pirate tech, it was some ind of mounted arm cannon, in place of where her right forearm should've been.And a ball of light would occasionally coalesce at the tip of this weapon, to be launched at an incoming Splinter. These seemed to do more damage than the normal, rapid-fire beams it fired, actually curving the space and air around it as it traveled torwards it's target. It even fired the occasional missile.

But for all it's fire power, it could still move with the agility and grace of a ninja, pulling rolls and flips that would be impossible to the normal human. Minutes later, it appeared she had defeated all her foes unscathed except for one she had missed. As she walked away (or at least it looked like a "she",) torwards an metal, octagonal door in the cliff face, the Splinter leaped at her, attempting to latch on to her back.

CRACK! She turned around to see the dead carcass of the creature, a new hole through it's head, and a wounded Marine Captain holdingasmoking sniper rifle