by Peter Nealen
The sun was blotted out as he ran forward, the cloud of dust and smoke reducing broad daylight to a grim twilight, lit by the flickers of weapons fire and occasionally by the brighter flashes of explosions. He started to see, as he advanced, that most of the fighting seemed to be happening far closer than he’d thought, well short of the target. It was a warning, but one that he didn’t heed.
He was a good ten or fifteen paces ahead of the lead section by then, not bothering to look back and check their dispersion, or that they were keeping up. He was their leader; it was their task to keep up with him.
He got another handful of paces before he faltered. Suddenly the darkness and murk seemed more oppressive, more threatening, and some of his self-confidence seemed to have fled. Fear started to grip him with icy fingers, and his steps stumbled as he started to shake. He stared around, suddenly in a panic that he had outpaced his men and been cut off. But he couldn’t see anything; the dimness had gotten worse. He couldn’t see more than a few meters in any direction.
He never saw the looming shape that killed him; there was too much murk in the air. Something like a buzzing insect tore through the air and struck him just beneath the armpit, neatly avoiding his body armor. A horrible agony gripped him suddenly as the thing penetrated only a half a handspan before it stopped and started chewing.
His screams were muted by the rest of the noise of the battle. He never saw his men falling under the same horrifyingly savage projectiles, nor did he see the swarm of hulking but terrifyingly swift shapes loping forward on long limbs to overwhelm what was left of his company.
All that Gaumarus Pell could tell for certain was that things were not going according to plan.
The advance had slowed almost as soon as it had started, and the 121st had not been in the front ranks of the assault to begin with. Through the displays in the halftrack’s troop compartment, Gaumarus could see the flashes of explosions ahead, where the front ranks had moved into the pall of smoke and dust surrounding the nearest grounded Hunterships.
“All sections, this is Capitan Desmeth,” the capitan called over the comm. “The lead elements have encountered stronger than expected resistance along the main axis of attack. We are being directed to move out to the right flank and attempt to penetrate closer to Target One. Once we have closed to seven hundred meters, we will dismount and advance by fire and movement, with the halftracks providing close fire support.”
“Acknowledged,” Yuusen replied. A moment later, Yuusen’s voice came over the section net. “Since visibility is extremely poor, and there seems to be some sort of sensor distortion going on the closer we get to the enemy’s ships, the route is being sent to your drivers’ consoles. We have about another kilometer to go before we dismount.”
The halftrack had just turned with a lurch as Roelsen steered toward their new navigation marker. The vehicle wasn’t doing well with the cratered ground, and that fact was nagging hard at Gaumarus’s mind. He had nothing else to do at the moment but think as he rode the rocking, lurching vehicle toward the battle, and something wasn’t quite adding up.
He realized that either the artillery had missed by nearly a kilometer, or the cratering wasn’t because of the bombardment at all. Which meant that it had been blasted in the ground specifically to slow the attackers down.
He was about to call Verlot and tell him what he’d figured out when the situation suddenly turned very, very bad.
He was looking at the periscope display, which was presently aimed at the lead halftrack. The clouds of obscuring smoke and dust were so thick that the other vehicle was almost the only thing visible in the darkness, so it became his natural focus even as he thought. So, he saw what happened with nightmarish clarity.
The thing that came flying out of the dust was moving far too quickly to be propelled only by its too-numerous limbs, but there was no jet exhaust that he could see. The body was a compact, multi-edged mass that looked like dark rock, while the twisting, scything limbs looked like they were made of some dully gleaming, black metal.
That was the only detail he could make out as the thing blew the turret off the lead halftrack with a strange, smoky-looking beam weapon, just before it landed on the top of the hull with an impact that made the vehicle sag on its axles and grind to a halt. Then it started carving the halftrack to pieces with what looked like blades extruded from several of its limbs, even as it reached out with another and speared the turret above Gaumarus’s head with another one of those weirdly dark beams.
Mertens didn’t have time to scream. Half his body slithered down into the troop compartment, ash sifting up from the ragged, blackened wound just above his belly. The stench of carbonized flesh and molten metal filled the troop compartment.
“Get out!” Gaumarus screamed. Without Mertens on the guns, they were going to be sitting ducks in the halftrack, especially if more of those things were out there.
Or if it finished with the lead halftrack as quickly as it looked like it might.
He hit the emergency release on the back ramp and it dropped like a stone, hitting the ground with a clang. He lunged off his seat and dove down the ramp, trying to get away from the armored vehicle that had just become little more than a target, hoping to get clear before it was hit…
He didn’t hear the explosion that threw him face-down in the crumbling dirt. The shockwave had knocked him unconscious before he even hit the ground. Nor did he feel the weight of debris and bodies that half-buried him a moment later.
7
The first thing Gaumarus Pell became aware of was pain.
At first it was only a dull ache, like waking up after one of Verlot’s more enthusiastic physical corrections, or after the day he had run afoul of an enraged nukto. He’d managed to kill the beast without taking too many wounds, but the battering he had taken at its paws had made it nearly impossible to move for days afterward.
But as he clawed closer and closer to consciousness, the ache turned into something far, far worse. The pain mounted, the terrible pressure on his body getting worse and worse as he tried to curl up into the fetal position. His head felt like someone was beating on it with a hammer, and the pain in his legs coupled with his immobility only made him fear the worst.
What happened? He wasn’t even sure where he was. He couldn’t see anything, and it took a moment to get past the fog of pain and slowly returning cognizance to realize that his face shield was buried in the dirt. He could barely breathe, and when he tried to lift his head, he found he couldn’t. There was a heavy weight on his back, holding his head down against the ground.
It all started to come flooding back, and panic added to the pain and disorientation. The battle, the chaos, the thing coming out of the murk to destroy the lead halftrack and blow Mertens in half…and then his own emergency dismount and the explosion that had knocked him cold.
He still couldn’t move. Suddenly afraid that he’d been buried alive, he started to struggle, his breath coming in fast, shallow pants as he started to panic in earnest.
Something shifted above him, and suddenly the weight on his helmet lessened. He could lift his head a little. No, not lift, but he could turn so that he wasn’t face-down anymore.
Fresh air reached him through a gap as his face shield rotated, and he took a deep, gasping breath. He almost immediately regretted it; it smelled of smoke, charred flesh, and worse.
The movement had also shifted the debris above him enough that he could see a little. Unfortunately, that meant he could see that part of what he was buried under included a mangled hand.
He might have gone into more of a panic attack at that, except that even as he saw it, movement beyond caught his eye, near the charred remains of one of the halftracks. He froze.
Much of the smoke and dust had settled, and the sun was now shining with a wan, yellowish light. And in that light, he could see the M’tait.
At least, that was what he thought they were. Several of the bigger things like the spidery construc
t that had destroyed the lead halftrack were visible, but most of the creatures moving around the wreckage of the battlefield were bipedal, standing about two and a half meters tall. While they had four limbs, two legs and two arms, they were arranged in an odd manner, their “legs” extending from their shoulders, with the bulk of their torsos hanging below, their considerably shorter manipulator limbs placed where most bipedal races had their legs.
Their torsos and heads were either made of or encased in a sort of dark, rock-like material, while their limbs looked like twisted cables of dark, metallic tubing. Their heads were set forward between their shoulders, and were tall and narrow, looking almost like the rough-hewn stone axe heads that some of the indig tribes still used, far out in the hinterlands. They clutched weapons or instruments of unfamiliar design in their manipulators as they moved around the battlefield.
And they were searching the piles of wounded and dead.
Even as he watched, he saw someone moving feebly, just beyond his hiding place. Two of the creatures were approaching the movement, their weapons trained toward the living man. The weapons didn’t look like any firearms he’d ever seen; they were blunt at one end and tapered at the other, with strange, jagged flanges surrounding the blunt end.
One of them loomed over the wounded man, who didn’t seem to be entirely aware of his surroundings. Attaching its weapon to the side of its torso, the M’tait reached down and pulled the man up off the ground.
The man screamed, and Gaumarus bit his tongue to keep from echoing the sound. The lower half of the man’s legs were just gone, trailing ragged strips of charred gore. He writhed and screamed as the M’tait held him off the ground, prodding him and apparently inspecting him.
Gaumarus heard a strange, distorted sound, and realized that the M’tait was speaking. It didn’t even sound like a language to him, and he’d listened to more than one indig language for hours, trying to comprehend it.
The M’tait abruptly dropped the man to the ground. He hit with a jarring impact, and if the wind hadn’t been knocked out of him, he probably would have screamed even louder. As it was, he just wheezed.
Then the three M’tait standing over him leveled their weapons. With a low hum, the wounded man’s flesh started to sizzle and scorch, and his agonized wheezing started to mount toward a hoarse scream.
Gaumarus squeezed his eyes shut as the killing went on. After the first few seconds, the wounded man fell silent. When he opened his eyes again, the M’tait were moving off again, their strange, sharp-edged heads swinging back and forth, searching for any other living humans.
The dead man was little more than a charred skeleton where they’d left him.
Gaumarus lay very still, his mind reeling from the horror of what he’d just seen. The M’tait were still searching, apparently looking for any survivors, systematically combing the battlefield.
And they were moving toward the mound of bodies and debris where he lay.
They stopped again, a few paces on. Again, one of them slung its weapon and reached down to heave something out of the way. Gaumarus couldn’t see what. And then they were dragging another man up off the ground.
This time, Gaumarus could recognize him. It was Eylen, one of the gunners from Third Section. He was clearly unconscious, but Gaumarus suspected that he had to still be alive if these monsters had shown any interest in him at all.
They held him up and prodded him, one dipping that sharp-edged face close to him. After several probes, he suddenly jerked and moaned, his eyes flicking open to stare into the blank, dark pits that must have served the M’tait for eyes.
For a brief moment, Eylen just stared, blinking against the glare of the sun. Then he started to scream.
One of the M’tait touched an instrument to his neck, and he stiffened, then went silent. But he was plainly still alive as two of them started to drag him back toward the distant spire of one of their grounded ships.
They’re taking prisoners. Why are they taking prisoners? He vaguely remembered stories of M’tait raiders abducting masses of the target populations where they struck, but had always dismissed the stories as exaggerations, embellishments to make the tale more frightening and inflate the menace of the monsters from outer space in the hearers’ minds. But here it was, right in front of him; the M’tait were looking for intact survivors and dragging them off to their ships.
He tried to shrink deeper into the shallow depression where he lay, hoping that he had taken the right steps along the Way, and that the M’tait searchers would pass him by. But they kept getting closer, continuing their systematic search.
Another blast of the strange noise that might have been their speech echoed from somewhere out of his sight, and the two nearest M’tait turned aside, staring off toward the source of the sound. After a brief exchange of sounds, they moved in that direction, taking them out of his field of view.
Are they gone? Or is this some cruel trick? He couldn’t be sure. Eylen hadn’t made a sound, but they’d found him anyway.
He waited, his mouth dry, his heart pounding, the terrific pain in his head and set deep in every bone reduced to a dull, throbbing ache simply by the fear. He listened hard, even as he shifted his hand ever so slightly, and felt the cool metal of his coilgun under his fingers.
He almost snatched his hand back. Coilgun fire was only going to bring the entire hunting party down on his head. He stifled a moan of fear, hoping that the slight movement hadn’t been seen.
Then he heard a moan.
For a second, he was afraid that he’d made the sound, that his fear had momentarily overwhelmed his urgency to keep quiet. But then it was repeated, not far away. Someone else was alive and had just come to. And from the sounds of it, he was badly wounded.
More of the weird M’tait speech crackled over the field, and Gaumarus had to stifle the urge to hiss at the wounded man to be quiet. He was far too close; if the M’tait started looking closely for the wounded man, they were going to find him, too. Lying still and playing dead would not avail him if they pulled the debris off and found him. Eylen’s fate had shown him that.
Another M’tait voice buzzed and crackled, entirely too close. A shadow fell across him. There was a M’tait standing over the mound where he was buried. He squeezed his eyes shut.
Stay still. Don’t move. Don’t make a sound. Hope that they’ll be too preoccupied with him to notice you.
But even as he thought it, he suddenly saw Waldenius Pell’s sour face in front of him, the craggy old features and cold eyes set in an expression of utter disgust. He thought of his father Dagarius, his eyes shifting anywhere rather than look his own father in the face. And he felt a deep flush of shame, as he realized that whoever was moaning back there, delirious with pain, it was likely one of his own fire-team.
He gritted his teeth, fighting back the wave of nausea that swept over him as he thought of moving at all. His fingers moved minutely, exploring the cool metal of his coilgun, trying to find where, exactly, he was touching it. He realized he was touching the action itself, not far from the pistol grip. It would take only a few centimeters of movement to get to the trigger.
Of course, he still had to bring the barrel to bear without blowing his own head off, but first things first.
The wounded man was crying out now, calling for help. There was an edge of panic in the voice, but Gaumarus recognized the voice now, and it only made matters worse.
It was Tillens. He had almost just laid there and let his best friend in the Section be captured or horrifically executed.
He gulped, and then he moved.
Heaving the weight of the dead off himself, he snatched up his coilgun and swung the barrel up. He almost fell over backward in shock; the M’tait who had been standing over him was a bare half-meter away.
The alien seemed almost as surprised as he was, and took a long step back, trying to bring its weird, flanged weapon to bear. But Gaumarus was desperate and already on the attack.
It was not
the best shooting he’d ever done. Flipping the coilgun to automatic, he sprayed half the magazine of ferrous pellets at the M’tait, firing from the hip. Even at that distance, at least half the projectiles missed.
The other half, however, chewed into the M’tait’s armored breast, over a hundred metal cones moving at hypersonic speeds by the time they exited the barrel with the faint coronal discharge of the electromagnetic field flickering around the muzzle.
The M’tait armor was certainly tough; most of the first shots simply bounced off, scattering high-velocity fragments of metal and some of the armor material. The fragments peppered Gaumarus’s hands and arms and scarred his already marred face shield. But under the relentless assault, the armor started to degrade and crack, and the last few shots that hit punched through.
The M’tait staggered backward with a harsh, ear-splitting noise that sounded like a nasty feedback loop. It didn’t fall though, so Gaumarus put the coilgun’s stock in his shoulder and held down the trigger, spraying the rest of the magazine into the growing wound in the center of its torso, that was starting to leak a pale fluid. More shots hit, punching deeper into the M’tait’s vitals, and it finally fell.
Then he looked up and around, his chest heaving, and saw even more of them closing in on him. Half a dozen of the flanged weapons were trained on him, and he knew it was only a matter of seconds before he died.
Another ripping burst of coilgun fire came from off to his side, forcing the M’tait back. “Pell!” a hoarse croak of a voice called. He looked over to see the blackened, bleeding form of Sergeant Verlot, his helmet gone, clamber out of another pile of bodies and debris, his coilgun clenched close, and dash toward Tillens. “Come on!”
Forcing his legs to respond, Gaumarus lurched to his feet and staggered toward Tillens. Verlot already had the man by his harness and was trying to pull him free. Another M’tait was down on the ground only a few meters away, twitching and making horrible grinding sounds, the same pale fluid leaking from a ragged hole in its chest.