The Battle for Eden

by Mark E Burgess

  The concentrated barrage of a handful of automatic weapons was deafening in the confined area of the courtyard. A hailstorm of bullets hit the aliens and knocked them sideways mid-stride. They stopped in their tracks and spun with inhuman speed. All four of their energy guns came to bear on the house, and they fired even as their bodies jerked and twitched from the impact of the humans’ onslaught. Brilliant plasma erupted from their weapons, lashing across the upper story windows wherein hid their attackers. The gunfire abated momentarily as the humans ducked for cover, but on cue Simon and the three brothers opened fire from the east and west ends of the courtyard, catching the Crabs in a deadly crossfire. As the beleaguered aliens turned to face this new threat, the humans in the house resumed firing down on them from above.

  Despite the toughness of their exoskeleton armor, the sheer volume of high velocity slugs ripped the two soldiers apart. Within seconds both Knackers sagged sideways as multiple limbs were blown off, and their aim became erratic, the energy beams from their guns flying haphazardly in all directions. Simon had to duck back as a white-hot lance sliced across the gap in the shed doors, nearly frying him in the process. Then he resumed firing position and leveled his weapon on the Crab that seemed more mobile. It was hitching itself spastically toward the rock wall in an effort to escape. He tracked it carefully and squeezed the trigger. His heavy gun kicked as it spat a two-second burst that removed the Knacker’s head from its body. It sagged to the ground, twitching weakly, and by then the other alien had joined it in its death throes.

  In less than fifteen seconds it was all over. As the echoes of gunfire faded away into a deathly quiet, cheers erupted around the courtyard. The defenders had won the first round.

  Simon squeezed between the shed doors and slowly walked across the courtyard toward the smoking carcasses. He saw no sign of life in either alien warrior. Tyrus emerged from the house momentarily, and walked over to join him as he surveyed the Knacker bodies. “I must say, that’s a pretty sight,” the older man said, nodding with an air of great satisfaction. “We’ve made quite a mess, though. In a day or two these things will stink even worse than they usually do. Boys!” he hollered at his sons, who had also exited the house and stood gazing uncertainly around them, clutching their weapons tightly. “At ease,” their father said calmly. “The threat is past. Give us a hand moving these Crabs out back before they spoil.” The youths seemed to relax then, and they put their weapons aside and slowly came over to join in the unsavory task of battlefield cleanup.

  * * * *

  That evening the family gathered at the long table in the dining room and shared a hearty meal. Tyrus sat at the table’s head, with Amanda at his right and his eldest son to his left. Katherine was seated next to her sister, and the rest of the family were strung out along the table in no particular order that Simon could discern. He took a seat opposite Katherine and dug into the chow. It was really good, a mixture of vegetables and a meat that he couldn’t identify. Being a Spacer he was used to encountering new cuisine as he moved planet to planet, but this was unusual, and he inquired as to its source.

  Sarah sat directly to his right, and she grinned as she answered, “Oh, that’s Dire Buck.”

  “I thought you said they were protected,” Simon said, puzzled.

  “They are,” she giggled. “You can’t hunt them or raise them for profit. But if you provide sanctuary on your property, you’re allowed to harvest an animal now and then.”

  “What exactly is a Dire Buck?” Simon inquired.

  Sarah frowned thoughtfully, and said, “You’d best ask Kate. She’s our resident animal expert.”

  Simon looked across the table with an inquiring expression. Katherine carefully put her fork down and met his eyes. Looking a bit uncomfortable at the attention, she cleared her throat and said, “Dire Bucks are the dominant herbivores on this continent. They’re mammals, or what passes for mammals on Eden. They’re warm-blooded and furred, but they don’t nurse their young. They also hatch from eggs, like nearly every life form here. Being grazing animals, they prefer the plains where low-growing vegetation is plentiful.” She smiled shyly at him as she finished, lowering her eyes once again.

  As always, Simon found Katherine’s voice hypnotic, the tones soft and melodic as if she were singing a soothing lullaby. And always with that faint mournful quality, hinting of depths beyond what his eyes could discern. He wanted to know more about her, to get past the public face that she presented to the world. It took discipline for him to simply ask instead, “What does a Dire Buck look like?”

  She cocked her head and squinted contemplatively. “I guess you could say they resemble a cross between a cow and a New Terran kangaroo.”

  “What?” Simon sputtered, trying not to choke on his food.

  Katherine laughed, and it was truly a wonderful sound, musical and throaty, and most of all, joyful. He would love to be able to inspire that in her more often. Still chuckling, she said, “Did my analogy sound bizarre? Well, I suppose they are a bit odd, at that. Dire Bucks are big, almost as large as modified cattle, and they are four-legged. But the rear legs are much larger and more powerful than the forelimbs, and they can raise their front end off the ground when reaching for fruits on trees and bushes. They also have a stout tail, which helps them balance when running or standing erect.”

  “Okay, I guess they would look like a cow-garoo,” Simon said with a grin. “Tell me, how do you know so much about wildlife?”

  Katherine looked away, and her smile faded a bit as she said softly, “I am...was...a veterinarian, in a prior life.” She met his gaze again, and he saw in her eyes a silent plea to not press further. He didn’t, but as the conversation turned to other subjects, he continued to contemplate the mystery that was Katherine Deloria.

  * * * *

  The next few days were quiet, with no incursions onto the homestead property. They waited and planned for the next Knacker move, which everyone knew was only a matter of time. Simon noticed that since the battle, the family had seemingly accepted him as one of their own, including him in their daily life and making their home his. He was surprised at how good that made him feel.

  Katherine’s daughter Jessie, in particular, appeared to have taken a liking to him, and she sought him out whenever he was unoccupied. In many ways she was a typical little girl, playful and silly, but she also had a hard streak that in some ways saddened Simon. No one that young should have to learn the things that she knew.

  As he had found out when they first met, Jessie was a staunch little warrior in her own right, fearless when it came to combat. She had been one of the people shooting down from the upstairs windows during the firefight. She also had accompanied the adults when they inspected the remains of the Knackers, poking curiously at the bodies as if she might learn something useful to use against the enemy. The two aliens had been disposed of in a firepit out back, and their equipment confiscated. The powerful energy weapons in particular could prove useful, though awkward for humans to fire.

  Simon met regularly with Tyrus to strategize and was impressed with the man’s ingenuity. Guerrilla resistance seemed second nature to him; perhaps that came from having trained in the ground forces.

  They were checking out the home defenses one day, and Tyrus showed Simon the large pitfall trap in the driveway just outside the yard gate. The size of the pit was impressive. It must have measured a good five meters on a side, and it had a metal trap door that could be triggered to collapse inward via remote control. When locked and covered with dirt and gravel, it was invisible to the naked eye. Simon suspected that the door could support a heavy vehicle driving over it during peacetime. Sensors might detect the underground chamber, but an attacking force would likely be distracted and not think to look underfoot.

  Tyrus and his sons opened the trap to check the mechanism and the explosive charges that were set inside. The pit was nearly seven meters deep, enough to swallow a small armored transport before blowing it to hell. The wor
k it must have entailed to build it was considerable, but the family had had years to prepare. It was amazing what a little paranoia and a lot of time could accomplish.

  After the trap door was tripped a few times without glitches, and the detonators were inspected and deemed functional, the pit was carefully closed and the door covered over with gravel and dirt. The end result looked once again like a mundane stretch of road.

  Simon grinned at Tyrus as he surveyed the final product. “You know a floater will just go right over this,” he commented.

  “Yep, but they usually bring at least one tracked vehicle, and those don’t fly,” the older man countered. “Just one makes this little surprise worth the effort.”

  “I hear you,” Simon agreed. “Now about another idea I’ve been considering. You know the equipment shed....” Tyrus listened as he described his concept, and the older man’s expression gradually morphed from quizzical to skeptical to approving as the idea was outlined.

  “You just might have something there,” he told Simon when he had heard the proposal. “Let me get on the computer and check out the building specs, and if it looks workable, I’ll get my boys on it right away.”

  Another quaint but potentially effective weapon took Simon totally by surprise. He saw the two older brothers, Keith and Samuel, bent over in the parking area in front of the house, working with something. As he approached he saw a box of bottles filled with what looked like water, and a long piece of elastic rubber about as wide as his hand. “Ah, you’re just in time,” Keith told him with a grin. “We need a third person to operate this.”

  “Operate what?” Simon asked, looking for some other device and seeing nothing.

  “Our slingshot,” Samuel replied. “It fires flame bottles, although these are just water; no need to waste fuel for practice.”

  A light went on in Simon’s brain, and he recalled an ancient device from his military history. You put a flammable liquid into a bottle that had a small open end. Cloth or a similar substance was stuffed into the hole to plug it, and to act as a fuse. The liquid inside soaked the cloth, and you lit the fuse and tossed the bottle. On impact it smashed, releasing the fuel within and creating a liquid fireball. Simple, but effective, especially given that the Crabs were surprisingly flammable.

  The one drawback was the limited throwing range, and the McKinleys seemed to have solved that issue. With Simon and Samuel each holding one end of the rubber strap, Keith nestled a bottle in the homemade slingshot. The young man then pulled the rubber band back until it was a struggle just to keep his feet. Aiming carefully, he released it. He had set the trajectory upward so that the bottle would clear the stone wall, and it sailed high and far before impacting the hard ground in the distance. Simon heard a faint tinkle of shattered glass, and Samuel yelled, “Yeah!”

  The boys worked for another hour, learning to gauge distance and aim the bottles with fair accuracy, before calling it a day. Simon walked off chuckling to himself at the display. Normally such a primitive weapon would stand no chance against technologically superior foes, but these were not normal times. The Knackers wanted live meals, which would limit their use of heavy weaponry. They would not be satisfied with standing back and pounding the house into submission with artillery.

  The stone wall also provided the defenders protection from line-of-sight weapons such as energy guns. Behind its cover, humans could lob cocktails at the Crabs with impunity, until they got close. Other family members would occupy the aliens with shots from projectile or energy guns fired from the second floor windows. Once the aliens closed in, the slingshot crew would retreat to the house, and take up fighting positions upstairs with the others.

  There was one weak spot in the plan, though, and Simon addressed this with Tyrus after he finished helping with the slingshot weapon. “I’m worried about a real assault,” he confessed. “A warrior squadron will bring different weapons than those used by scouts. Knacker squads are deployed to collect food, not just survey. They’ll have weapons designed to capture us alive. I’m worried about them lobbing neuro-gas over the wall.”

  “As you should be,” Tyrus agreed. “Which is why we’ll be wearing gas masks as soon as we see them coming.” Simon just shook his head and shut his mouth; these folk had covered the contingencies as well as any general he had served under. He vowed never to view civilians the same way again.

  After the incident with the scouts, over a week passed with no further Knacker incursions. Both Simon and Tyrus were surprised at the delay; perhaps the Crabs were preoccupied elsewhere. Tyrus ran through the channels on the vidscreen and to their astonishment, there were still a few human broadcasts on air. Their status reports were brief, but the essence of them was that humans were fighting back all around the planet. Not on a large scale, and not with any major military objective, but they were refusing to go quietly into the night.

  At this stage the human-occupied worlds all knew of the Knacker threat, had known of it for years. This had caused changes in societies throughout the Federation, including beefed up military spending and a higher rate of enlistment in the armed forces. It turned out that civilians had changed their habits as well, and on Eden, many thousands had bought firearms and learned how to use them. A surprising number also owned gas masks.

  Now the Knackers were learning hard lessons first taught on Old Earth, where guerrilla troops in the past had effectively harassed much larger and better-armed invasion forces for extended periods of time. The guerrillas had utilized advantages of surprise and an intimate knowledge of their home turf to keep one step ahead of the invaders. Now humans used these same principles against an alien aggressor, and they had one further advantage—the enemy did not want to kill, whereas the defenders had no such compunction. Street by street, building by building, humans ambushed the aliens and retreated, only to set up and do it again. Their efforts were more harassing than devastating, but they resulted in a fair number of Crabs being maimed or killed, and they slowed the aliens’ efforts to subdue and collect their prey. The Knackers found themselves having to devote greater resources to security and fire protection than was their wont. This took warriors away from other tasks such as investigating small-scale field incidents. Hence the delay in sending troops to the homestead when their scouts went missing.

  But arrive they eventually did. One morning just after breakfast the perimeter alarms sounded on everyone’s wrist coms. People dropped whatever they were doing and scrambled to gather in the greatroom. Within a minute they were all there, some still tugging on clothes as they arrived. By now everyone was getting familiar with the routine.

  Tyrus identified two different breaks in the perimeter sensor system, one where the private drive left the highway, and another several hundred meters to the south. He pointed to the icons on the vidscreen, saying, “Looks like they’ve split up. Probably they’re trying to avoid an ambush, or if one happens, they want at least one party to survive and report what occurred.”

  “We’ll need to get to the wall and spy out what’s coming,” Simon offered.

  “Yes, we’ll send the boys out with farscopes, to watch the road and the savanna to the south of it.” Turning to his sons, he instructed them, “Use your wrist coms to tell us as soon as you know what the Crabs are bringing. I’ll watch from the upper floor windows as well. Now go!” The brothers nodded and darted for the door.

  A few minutes later they had their answer: two pairs of Crabs were advancing toward the house from different directions, on foot, with no vehicles in sight. Tyrus shook his head in amazement as he and Simon received the reports. “They must be strung really thin to only send two scout teams. Well, we’ll not need the pitfall trap or slingshot. Let’s go with the variation on the shed plan that you thought up, Simon.”

  A short time later Simon was again in the equipment shed, minus his furry scan-blocker. This time he wore a mask, just in case the Crabs brought neuro-gas. The air inside the face gear was stuffy and stunk of rubber, but it beat hav
ing his limbs turn to rubber from breathing the paralytic compound.

  The four Knackers converged near the front gate, and cautiously peeked and probed the area inside the stone wall. They carried multiple energy guns and other devices whose purpose was unclear. Sensing only one human life form inside the wall, they advanced into the open courtyard area and turned toward the shed. This time, though, they took extra precautions. The lead Crab raised an odd-looking device that resembled a short cylindrical tube with a handle on the bottom. A hollow “poof” echoed through the courtyard as the device spewed what looked like a glass ball toward the shed. The object shattered against the shed wall, and a faint orange vapor expanded rapidly outward from the point of impact.

  “Neuro-gas!” hissed Tyrus into his wrist com, as he watched the action from a second floor window. “Everyone make sure your masks are fitted tight! Hold fire; wait for them to move in.”

  Twice more the weapon huffed as the aliens sent neuro-gas canisters toward the house and the rock garden. Finally, satisfied that they had addressed any possible ambush risk, they headed en masse toward the shed. The humans in the house remained perfectly still, watching.

  Simon waited in the shed as before, and he carried his heavy automatic, but this time the plan was different. The structure was now mostly empty, the heavy equipment having been moved and parked outside. Toward the back of the shed the humans had piled miscellaneous boxes and junk. This obscured Simon from direct view (and hopefully from direct fire) where he crouched low at the rear wall. Not coincidentally, there was a small doorway in the wall, recently made by Tyrus’s cutting tool, and just big enough for Simon to slither out through once the aliens were inside the shed. The key was to wait until they all were within the walls, but not long enough to actually be caught. The timing had to be perfect.