by Peter Nealen
The second lasted a moment longer. Coming up through looser soil, it was momentarily obscured by the cloud of flying dirt kicked up by the drill, buying it a precious few seconds even as its sister machine died. The beam weapons crackled and flashed in the cloud of dust, rocks, and clods, turning soil and stone molten where they touched.
Four heavies bounded through the flying dirt, clamping onto the emerging tunneler with claws seemingly extruded from whipping limbs. Some of those claws were smashed and torn away by the whirling teeth of the forward drill, but that didn’t buy the indig warriors inside more than a few seconds. More beam weapons lashed out, carving through the drill and allowing new claws to clamp on and start tearing the metal open.
The indig warriors managed to get a few shots at the heavies, but their repeaters couldn’t penetrate the stony-looking armor. Just before the tunneler was torn completely open, one of them fired the rockets stacked inside.
The tunneler blew apart with a catastrophic blast, throwing a cloud of jagged fragments, shattered rock, and smashed heavies flying at lethal velocity for hundreds of meters.
By then, the other three tunnelers had already been blasted, torn, or burned open, and the indig warriors inside were all dead. The lucky ones died quickly.
The M’tait made sure that it took the unlucky ones as long as possible to die.
The indig weren’t limited to just the field telephones for signaling. That should have been obvious, given the other machinery and weapons they possessed, but to some of the Provenians, it was proving difficult to reconcile what they were seeing with what they had simply known about the indig for years and years. So, a few were surprised when Fights with Great Beasts lifted a radio to his ear hole and listened to the crackling, whistling transmission. The chirping and clicking indig speech sounded like little more than vague radio noise to the human ear, but Fights with Great Beasts froze for a moment before turning to Blue Moon Above the Salt Cliff.
The interlocutor between indig and human returned Fights with Great Beasts’s gaze, then turned back to Gaumarus. [The warriors left in the trenches above report that the diversionary attack has failed,] he signed. [All five tunnelers were destroyed as soon as they surfaced. And the Raiders from the Sky are spreading out in our direction. Fights with Great Beasts thinks that they know we are here.]
“What did he say, Gaumarus?” Kan Tur asked.
Gaumarus couldn’t answer right away. He was staring at Blue Moon Above the Salt Cliff in horror, his mind trying to catch up with the news. They’d failed. They’d lost. And soon they’d all be dead.
19
Kan Tur’s hand tightened on his shoulder. “What. Did. He. Say. Corporal?” The Knight’s words were still coming through that flat, emotionless translator, but the deliberate cadence and the firm, almost painful grip got through the fog of fear and terror that was gripping Gaumarus. He looked up at Kan Tur’s featureless helmet.
“The diversionary attack failed,” he whispered hoarsely. “They’re all dead.”
As quietly as he had spoken, his voice still carried in the shallow, camouflaged pit. There was a rustle of movement, almost intangible, the sound of fear.
Colonel Piett suddenly came to life, lunging toward the trenches, scrabbling at the dirt like a terror-stricken animal. Raesh grabbed him and tackled him to the ground before he could disturb the camouflage covering overhead. Maes started to protest, but was silenced by a hand over his mouth. The hand belonged to one of Verheyen’s men, a skinny, gawky man named Doss. Doss hadn’t seemed to be worth much, but here at the clinching point, he recognized the need for quiet.
Piett was still thrashing under Raesh’s weight, and starting to make noise. Kan Tur suddenly moved, coming alongside the struggling Provenians and putting the muzzle of his powergun against Piett’s head. The fat officer suddenly went very still.
“I do not relish the idea of killing you, Colonel,” Kan Tur said softly. His voice carried in the enclosed space nevertheless. “I am a warrior, not an executioner. But you threaten to expose all these men to death if you do not desist. To execute you as a coward might not be my place as an off-worlder, but here in this pit, there are no natives, no off-worlders. There are only warriors united to fight the M’tait. Be silent, or I will silence you permanently. I will pray for forgiveness afterward, but you will be dead.”
The nervous movement in the pit and the murmurs of fear and borderline panic had suddenly stilled. Every eye was on Kan Tur. As he turned away from Colonel Piett, Morav Dun spoke. He used his translator too, so the Provenians understood.
“I hope you have a plan, Kan Tur,” he said.
In a heartbeat, things had changed. Morav Dun still outranked Kan Tur, but it seemed as if, faced with imminent slaughter, something had shifted. That rank no longer mattered. Kan Tur had taken over the leadership role, and even Morav Dun, in his pride, was suddenly forced to acknowledge it.
“Using the tunnelers for the diversionary attack was a mistake,” Kan Tur said. “Against the M’tait, we should have known that they would be detected. The vibrations alone would have been a dead giveaway against our own sensors, never mind those monsters’. I think that, if we are careful and use the terrain as best we can, we might manage to slip through where the tunnelers could not.
“That said, the Mastership is a lost cause. We would never reach it, no matter how carefully we snuck through the low ground. We all saw the Plain from the bunker above.”
“What would you do?” Morav Dun asked. “The Mastership was our greatest hope of striking them a crippling blow.”
“That crippling blow might be out of our reach right at the moment,” Kan Tur allowed. “But we can hurt them, possibly badly enough to give them pause and give our human and abo allies enough breathing room to consolidate their defenses.” He drew out the little holo display again, shielding it with his armored body as he lay it on the ground and activated it. “There is a Huntership grounded less than a kilometer away. That is going to be our target.”
Everyone stared at the little holo for a moment. The picture was incomplete, but better than what they could see from inside the pit. Clearly, Kan Tur hadn’t just been gaping at the nightmare below when they’d been staging in the bunkers; he’d been using that little device to map what could be seen of the Plain.
“We won’t make it far in this big mob,” one of the Knights said. “With the numbers out there, they’ll be all over us in moments.”
“True enough,” Kan Tur replied. “We would have to split up and take several different routes.” He looked at Blue Moon Above the Salt Cliff, then at Gaumarus. “The abos know the ground better than we do.”
Gaumarus didn’t have to translate. Blue Moon Above the Salt Cliff was already signing, [There are many little streambeds in this part of the plain, coming down from the hill behind us. They would hide a small group for a short distance, but the ground gets very flat near where that ship stands.]
“We would be committed by then, anyway,” Xanar Dak said, after Gaumarus translated. “Fortunately, we have more powerguns now; they will be more effective against M’tait armor than the locals’ coilguns or the abos’ repeaters. We will be able to use some fire and movement to get closer.”
“For a few dozen meters, perhaps,” Morav Dun said. “Against those numbers, it will hardly be enough.”
“That is why we have to split up into numerous separate groups,” Gaumarus said, the realization hitting him. “The more groups and the more they are dispersed, the more likely that one is going to get through.”
“Except that we only have the one thermonuclear charge, Corporal, did you forget that?” Morav Dun said. He shook his head. “It would be a brave gesture, Kan Tur, but only a gesture. There is no chance that it will succeed.”
“And what would you do, Morav Dun?” Kan Tur demanded. “Retreat again? Hide in a hole until they go away? Let who knows how many more Provenians--human and abo--be slaughtered or herded into the Hunterships, never to be seen aga
in?”
“A futile attack would be far costlier than no attack,” Morav Dun said.
“Then we should make sure it isn’t a futile attack, then,” a voice said.
All eyes turned toward the voice. Gaumarus noted with some surprise that it was Evrard who had spoken. The strange little man was staring at the little holo with his usual odd, slightly too intense fixity. He looked up at Gaumarus. “The main diversionary attack failed,” he said. “They tried to get too big. Maybe we should try another one. Won’t be as big, maybe. But if we can draw enough of them away, it might thin out the herd enough for the main attack to get through.”
Blue Moon Above the Salt Cliff was speaking softly, translating Evrard’s words to Fights with Great Beasts. The indig war leader chirruped something in reply, and Blue Moon Above the Salt Cliff signed to Gaumarus, [Fights with Great Beasts says that if Stares Unblinking at Death is willing, he and his personal warrior band will go with him to make this diversion.]
Gaumarus raised an eyebrow a little at that. Evrard had not, so far as he knew, had much of any interaction with the indig prior to the last few days. Fights with Great Beasts had just given him an indig name in the last few moments, based on what he had just said. Possibly based on the way he’d stared at the holo; could the indig be better at reading humans than humans at reading indig?
Fights with Great Beasts didn’t seem to be interested in much in the way of further planning. He was already starting to marshal his few warriors in that pit, and gathering as much of their explosives and heavy weapons as possible. It looked like the old warrior was planning on going out with as big a bang as possible.
Blue Moon Above the Salt Cliff spoke quickly, then turned to Gaumarus after Fights with Great Beasts’s curt reply. [I will stay with you, along with a hand of our warriors. We would see the main attack through.]
Gaumarus nodded. He was glad, in a way. If he had to die, there were worse places to do it than beside his friend.
Evrard looked him in the eye for the first time. The same strange, slightly offputting intensity was still there. “Never was worth much,” the little man said. “If I hadn’t been an Evrard, I probably would have already been spending the rest of my miserable life in Serkel.” Serkel Prison was one of three maximum security prisons on the planet. Gaumarus wondered just what Evrard had done.
Then he decided that he didn’t want to know. It didn’t matter at that moment. All that mattered was what the off-kilter little man was about to do.
Then Evrard was following Fights with Great Beasts through the connecting trench to the next pit, disappearing around the corner.
Gaumarus had never known the man before the battle. Now he would never see him again.
Corbinian Evrard had never felt like he fit in among humans.
Not that he fit in with the indig, either. He knew that there was something broken inside him, the same thing that had led him to dispassionately beat a man to death for stealing from him when he was barely fifteen. That the man had been a Latecomer, and Corbinian one of the Evrard Family, had meant that the crime had been swept under the rug. But nothing had ever been the same since.
He wasn’t emotionless, not quite. He could feel. It was just that sometimes, when he got angry, that was all he could do. He just…reacted. And when he did, people got hurt, or things got destroyed.
He’d been enough of an embarrassment to the Evrard Family that he’d never been allowed to seek a commission. The horror at the thought of what he might do as an officer had meant that he’d been kept back, kept to the outer marches of the Evrard lands until he couldn’t be hidden anymore. The Family obligations to the PDF, laid out by the original Charter, must be fulfilled. So, he’d been allowed to enlist as a footslogger, where it was hoped that either he’d be able to funnel his single-minded rage into killing Latecomer rebels, or he’d simply be conveniently killed and forgotten.
Somehow, he’d managed to survive half a dozen clashes with the rebels, while keeping his outbursts under control by being the strange, quiet loner who never mixed much with his squadmates. It had been hard. But he’d done it. And now here he was, running crouched double amid indig fighters, with a handful of other humans, clenching a powergun he’d never imagined he’d get to use. Soon he wasn’t going to have to worry about controlling himself anymore. Soon, he’d be able to avoid everyone, everywhere. Forever. But first, he could finally let loose, let the monster out of its cage.
The indig were leading the way, scuttling out of the camouflaged pit with that strange crawl of theirs, down on all fours with their weapons strapped to their backs. Evrard and the other humans, including one of the Knights, whose name he neither knew nor cared about, had to follow slightly more slowly. Humans weren’t built to move quickly on all fours.
The old, hoary indig leading the diversionary attack—Evrard didn’t know his name and didn’t care—didn’t lead them directly out onto the open ground. The trenches had been dug in such a way that they opened out onto one of the rilles that folded the ground around the base of the knob they’d come down from. That was smart. But even Evrard knew that the concealment wouldn’t last long.
It didn’t. They might have gotten a hundred meters before the distorted, staticky howl that seemed to herald a M’tait attack suddenly sounded, echoing weirdly across the Plain.
Some of the indig, along with most of the humans, half stepped at that sound. As for Evrard, he ignored it, and kept forging ahead, almost catching up with the old indig war leader, who hadn’t slowed, hadn’t even twitched at that noise. Evrard wasn’t afraid. He never was afraid. He knew that was one of the broken parts about him. But if ever there was a time where his brokenness would help, this was that time.
A sane soldier might have kept his head down and tried to make more distance before opening fire. It might have bought those behind him some more time, even as it bought him a few more seconds of life. Evrard knew it. But he didn’t think he had that much time. And he had an idea.
Rising up to his full height, which wasn’t terribly impressive by Provenian human standards, but still towered over the indig, he lifted his powergun to his shoulder. It was vaguely unfamiliar compared to his coilgun, but Evrard took a certain detached pride in being able to use any weapon that came to hand. Even if he’d never seen it before.
He could just see the slayers starting to move in on them. They were unhurried, spreading out to encircle the little band. As alien as they were, he knew that they were confident, fearless. They weren’t fighting enemy soldiers, they were hunting prey.
He’d make them afraid. He turned and forged up the side of the rill just a little, to get a clearer shot.
There were other things moving among the slayers, some sort of low, fast-moving biomechanoids that he hadn’t seen before. They didn’t charge forward like the heavies. That was all he cared about. They weren’t coming right for him, so they were secondary targets.
He leveled his powergun at the nearest slayer and fired.
He hadn’t quite been ready for the brilliance of the flash or the intensity of the thunderclap. He’d seen powergun fire, out on the Monoyan Plain, but it was slightly different, firing the weapon himself.
Not that it mattered to him.
The brilliant, faintly blue-green bolt transfixed the slayer through its weird, axe-shaped head. The upper blade of its helmet, or skull, or whatever it was, was blasted clear, flying up into the air as the thing collapsed, falling forward into the dirt.
He was already shifting targets before it had hit the ground.
He shot two more as fast as he could cycle the trigger, and then the old indig was beside him, firing three rapid shots with that big, booming repeater before grabbing Evrard by the arm with a surprisingly strong grip and dragging him back down. A moment later, a ripple of rockets streaked out from the rim of the little hollow, to hammer into the M’tait’s advancing swarm.
The indig were continuing to move down the low ground, scuttling low and fast. The
Knight and several of the other human soldiers were with them, and for a moment Evrard thought they were trying to run away. He didn’t feel anything in particular about it. That surprised him a little; he would have expected to get angry. But he had to care about something to get angry, and heroism or cowardice weren’t things he’d ever really cared about.
Even as the gray-bristled oldster pulled him along, he understood. They weren’t running away, not really. There wasn’t any running away from this. But if they could get the M’tait to chase them…
The Knight slowed and scrambled up the side, pumping half a dozen powergun bolts at the M’tait before dropping back down. As he did, three of the indig rapidly started placing satchels of explosives in the bank beside him.
Evrard and the old indig were near the rear of the pack now, but they were gaining. The Knight was forging ahead as the last of the indig prepped his charge, and Evrard and the oldster ran past the smoking explosives right behind him.
They didn’t get far before the charges went off, hammering Evrard onto his face in the rill, which had become little more than a ditch at that point. He scrambled to his feet, feeling the blood trickling down his back and feeling the heat as a M’tait beam weapon swept a crackling, smoking line across the ground in front of him. It missed him, but cut the little indig engineer in half.
He fired three shots, then crawled over the bisected body, ignoring the strange stench of burnt indig flesh and blood, and kept going.
For some reason, the group ahead was slowing. The thunderclaps of powergun shots were interspersed with the deeper, rolling booms of indig repeaters. The ditch dipped down a little and around a bend, and then he saw what was happening.
There was no way forward. The swarms of M’tait slayers were ahead, to either side, and, when he looked back, behind. They were surrounded.