Already Among Us

by Unknown

  Schurman raised her binoculars and studied the rear guard. A couple of the calves who'd said they were old enough to walk looked ready to drop in their tracks. But they were keeping up, thanks to the younger females assigned to the rear guard. They were touching the calves with their trunks, or even letting them suckle at dry breasts.

  Drina had assigned to the rear guard several females whom Schurman would rather have had with the scouts, and they'd nearly had an argument about it. But in the amber dawn nothing seemed really worth splitting the leadership of the treck; Schurman gave in. Now she knew that Drina had been right—as usual.

  Nice to know that the Hathis may be able to cope without human associates. If the Hivers really try to squat on this planet, our friends may have to do just that.

  She looked at the map again. Six kloms to the nearest point on the river, but that was rapids, a bad place for crossing. Two kloms upstream was an old bridge, built across two rocky islets by the PE & D people. Local materials, hastily constructed, and human specs—Hathis were probably too heavy for it the day it was built, never mind now.

  Seven kloms downstream, on the other hand, was a ford nearly a klom wide. The Hathis practically could cross it in line abreast, which would make up for the fact that the forest cover didn't come as close to the bank as it did upstream.

  Better decide before those triple-damned bulls show up and insist on putting their wet trunks in! Drina will get them to shut up after a while, but we don't have too much time to stand around in the open—

  Then they had no time, as shots trailed smoke from the rocks to her right and warheads erupted in flame and rock fragments on her left.

  Schurman recognized the basic Hiver infantry weapon, a rocket-propelled grenade launcher that made up in warhead yield what it lacked in accuracy. Really overkill for anti-personnel work, unless the target was armored—or larger and tougher than most sapient beings.

  She didn't scream or vomit. She pushed the idea that the Hivers had been expecting the Hathis as far down as it would go and fused the door shut over it.

  By then, total confusion had overtaken the clan. Or what might have looked like total confusion, to someone who didn't know their Hathis.

  The rear guard was angling to the left, working up to a run to open the distance as quickly as possible. The right-flank cows were turning, putting on threat displays, but not yet drawing the bush-cutters slung under their bellies. The longer the Hivers stayed confused about what they faced, the less they'd worry about the Hathis getting in close.

  The cultural-contamination mavens and the Federation military had formed an unholy alliance against teaching the Hathis to use modern weapons. They'd offered more excuses than reason, and Schurman would have given twenty years off her life to have the excuse-makers staked out on the hillside as targets for the Hivers. She'd have given fifty to have even a dozen Hathis equipped and trained with any sort of light artillery, or even SSW's.

  The Hivers were finding enough targets as it was. One grenade hit a calf's cart. Piece of wagon, pieces of calf, and pieces of rock joined fragments and bits of burning torch-compound in spraying Hathis over a wide radius. The Hathi pulling the cart screamed and broke into a panic-stricken run.

  Her panic seemed to draw the Hiver fire like a magnet. Three more grenades struck around her. She blundered on, blind and screaming. As Schurman shrieked at Voulo to stop and let her down, a last grenade smashed into the fleeing Hathi, opening her belly and throat. Blood and internal organs gushed out as she sank to her knees, screams fading into a hideous gurgle.

  Now Schurman was on the ground, darting for the nearest piece of cover. As she ran, she tried to count the opposition. From the smoke trails, she came up with a guess of four.

  Four? It didn't make sense, unless this was a patrol sent out from the LZ to scout first, ambush later. Three humans with rifles and two hundred Hathis against four Hiver Warriors might not be such a hopeless fight after all.

  Provided that the Warriors were their Navy types, unused to ground combat, and that all the humans stayed alive to use their rifles. Schurman stopped worrying about tactics and started concentrating on finding someplace to start shooting.

  By the time she'd found it, the rear guard was out of Hiver range, although they'd left another calf and three more older Hathis behind. One was still moving, until suddenly he jerked, reared up, and fell on his side. Schurman scanned the field of the dead and saw a dark-skinned figure in shorts and bush boots low-crawling among the bodies. Nate Kiombo had fired a mercy shot, and was now moving up on the enemy's flank under the cover of dead Hathis.

  Schurman would have given ten years for a military chain of command among the Hathis. As it was, all she could do was hook her radio to the translator and call Drina.

  (“THEY ARE FEW. IF THE SCOUTS ON OUR SIDE CAN MOVE TO THE FAR SIDE OF THE ENEMY, KIOMO-BULL AND I CAN ATTACK THEM WITH OUR GUNS. THEY WILL SHOOT AT US AND THE SCOUTS CAN COME CLOSE.”)

  (“WHERE IS THE FAR SIDE?”)

  (“DO YOU HAVE YOUR FAR-SEERS ON?”) The Hathi Project had done more to augment intelligence than eyesight, picking out a man-sized object at fifty feet was still a good job for Hathi without goggles.

  (“YES.”)

  (“THEY SHOULD GO AROUND BEHIND THE THREE TREES ON THE POINTED ROCK, THEN CHARGE DOWNHILL WITH THEIR BRUSH CUTTERS.”)

  Trumpeting blasted back and forth, and the scouts began to move. The Hivers opened fire on them, but they were at long range, and the Hivers seemed to be short of either ammunition or marksmanship. Only one scout was bleeding when they moved out of Schurman's field of vision.

  As the scouts moved left, Schurman moved right. Her stomach twisted at the reek of blood and torn flesh as she reached the field of the dead, but Granger had come in too. The men needed leadership more than she needed time to stop and throw up.

  “There's only four or five of them that I can count,” Kiombo said. “I think somebody must have sent them out more or less to see what they could see, and shoot it to see what it did after that. There's one upslope who may be able to shoot at the scouts when they charge. I think we can keep the others' heads down.”

  They did an ammunition count, which came up with the discouraging figure of about thirty rounds each. But they'd begun the trek armed for predator-protection, not for firefights with Hivers.

  Schurman nestled behind the outstretched body of a dead calf, then peered around his rump with her binoculars. Three of the squat, four-armed figures of Hivers sprang out from the scrubby slope, with their distinctive sensor-loaded helmets and dusty armor.

  Schurman cut out the laser element from her sights. This wasn't the easiest shot she'd ever tried—it was her first against a sapient target, for one thing—but the laser took way more in concealment than it gave in accuracy. She exhaled, and halfway through the exhaling caressed the firing button.

  It was a good shot. The Hiver went down, rose almost at once, but seemed to be unsteady on his feet. He had to be half-deaf and maybe short of sensors, with a clean helmet shot. A few cems to the right and she'd have got his faceplate and maybe his eyes or even brain. Hivers were tough, but as with Hathis, toughness didn't translate into invulnerability.

  Granger and Kiombo also got in shots on the exposed Hiver before he found a new lair. That suggested to Schurman that they were indeed Hiver Navy Warriors, with minimal ground-pounder skills. Seasoned Raiders would have put more than four Warriors on patrol, for one thing. Finding them without tripping over them would have been impossible except for Federation Regulars or even Rangers.

  The two downslope comrades of the damaged Warrior let fly, shooting no better than before but apparently no longer worrying about ammunition supplies. Smoke trails crisscrossed in midair, grenades chewed up hard ground and soft Hathi flesh, and the reek of alien chemicals and charred Hathi clawed at Schurman's lungs.

  Unable to return fire without exposing herself, she looked to her rear. The rest of the clan was now out of range, except for ano
ther band of scouts who were dropped back to form a new rearguard. Some of the Hathis were nearly under cover of the anvil-cones and scrub lance-leaf to the south.

  They'd be safe there from anything these four Warriors were likely to be carrying. Not from air attacks launched by Hivers who now had to suspect the Hathis, but even those would take time to launch.

  We'll at least sit at the same table with those who died to buy time for their comrades. Schurman wondered what Valhalla would do if a Hathi showed up at the gates, and how the shield-maidens would react to providing two hundred kilos of green leafies and a barrel of mead each day for each Hathi.

  Then more things than Schurman could keep track of happened. The flanking party of scouts thundered out from behind the trees, going downhill faster than Schurman had ever seen a Hathi move on such ground. One of the Warriors rose from cover to stare, and a slug punched through his faceplate. His helmet sensors erupted in smoke and he lurched into the open, staggering about blindly, clawing with all four hands at his ruined face until he fell.

  The upslope Warrior also stood up. He was out of range of the humans below, but could have slaughtered the scouts at point-blank range. Instead, he did what many men faced with charging elephants had done—he froze, staring at them as he tried to believe the unbelievable—and suffered the same fate.

  He wasn't decapitated; his armor saved him from that. But one set of tusks flung him twenty meters, and he landed on his head. A trunk picked him up by an ankle and swung him hard against the first half-dozen convenient rocks and trees. Then the two other Hathis played tug-of-war until both the Warrior's legs came off in a spray of pinkish blood, as the other Hathis charged down the surviving Warriors.

  They stood their ground, fired, brought down three of the six chargers, then cut out at a sharp angle to the right, heading uphill over ground too rough to let the Hathis follow. Schurman sent four more rounds after the Hivers but couldn't detect any hits, then wondered why her comrades weren't firing.

  She stopped wondering when she saw Kiombo kneeling over Granger, frantically unwrapping a field dressing. Granger half lay, half sat, propped against the leg of a dead Hathi. His own right leg was a bloody mess form knee to ankle, and there was blood on his chin where part of his beard had been.

  Schurman swore in three languages, none of which relieved her feelings. Their chances of being an effective rear-guard had just shrunk a good bit, no fault of Dr. Granger's but why now--?

  The Hiver attacker slid into view, hovering just above the ridge of the hill. The two surviving Warriors waved all four arms in more than four directions apiece, and the attacker's dorsal turret popped up. It swiveled and the beamer nozzle began to glow.

  Schurman remembered a blessing for those about to die at the hands of the ungodly. She even rememberd the Hebrew for it.

  But the death wasn't for her. The beamer lanced flame across two thousand meters into the forest, the intended refuge of the rest of the clan. Hathis screamed and dry trees boomed into pillars of flame.

  Then the attacker rose into the air again. It rose abruptly, as if the pilot had spasmed while controlling it, tilting as it rose. It rose high enough for Schurman to see sky under it, then fell directly on top of the two Warriors seeking refuge. It bounced, rolled off their crushed corpses, and went on rolling down the slope until it jammed against a boulder and stopped. A chemical-fuel tank in the port lateral fin spewed flame, but it was too nearly empty to explode.

  A dozen or more Hathis came scrambling down the slope after it. Bulls, from their size—then Schurman recognized Tarran's right-tusk bull, Kawor, at the head of the dozen. He wore his logging helmet and harness and carried a chain cutter in his trunk.

  The other bulls stopped, to wrap trunks with the surviving scouts or mount guard over the bodies. Kawor came on down, looking even bigger than Schurman remembered him and all business.

  (“WHERE IS DRINA?”)

  Schurman discovered that a fragment had pierced something vital in the translator, and could only wave. Kawor patted her with his trunk and hurried off to report to the matriarch. Schurman sat down, unslung her translator, started to run the diagnostic program, then realized that she needed to find high ground and get a view of the battlefield first. The attacker couldn't be the only air support the Hivers had around, and if any more came in—

  Shouting to Kiombo to watch for signs of life from the attacker, Schurman ran up the hill. Both her clothes and her breathing were ragged by the time she got there, but her first sight at least stopped her worrying about the attacker's crew.

  No wonder the attacker had gone flying. The bulls must have charged it with the full weight of sixty or more tons of Hathi moving at more than thirty km/h. In the process they'd smashed open the cockpit, and one of them had jerked the pilot out with a trunk around his neck. Nothing except the spinal cord kept the Hiver's head attached to his body.

  Schurman had to sit down; her legs simply mutinied. Then she rolled off the rock and tried to hide behind it, even if it was only ten cems high, as explosions thundered to the north.

  Plural. One was close and from its position had to be the bridge. The other was much farther off, and three more equally-distant explosions—secondaries or maybe time-fused bombs—followed it rapidly. What the Hades lay off that way that the Hivers--?

  She'd just formulated the question when she got her answer. A Hiver shuttle screamed overhead, climbing vertically and going supersonic as it did. Four missiles leaped up as if by magic, punched through the shock waves, and exploded.

  When the Federation Navy heavy attacker swept into view, Schurman stopped worrying about anything except pieces of Hiver shuttle falling on her Hathis. Oh, and burns on the ones in the forest, and wounds among the bulls and scouts, and if Kawor was going to try for First Bull now that he'd have dozens of cows and youngsters grateful to him, and would the Navy help her find Govinche and drag him out here because there were too many hurt Hathis for the human hands available to help them....

  Her mind didn't stop racing until she saw Nate Kiombo climbing the hill, picking his way almost weed by weed and rock by rock. She ran down to greet him, and her greeting somehow turned into a hug.

  He returned it, then grinned. “Don't worry. I'm not hurt. Granger will make it too. The Navy's going to drop a medkit for now and arrange for medevac as soon as the locals get organized again. The Hathis will be up to us, though, so we'd better get started.

  The reek of burning Hathi flesh broke through Schurman's relief, and she sagged against Kiombo, nearly knocking him backward. As she stepped back, she wiped her forehead with the back of her hand. It came away coated with soot, dust, and blood, sometimes all three in the same place.

  “All right, Nate.” She hugged him again.

  “Anyone would think you're in estrus,” he said with an even wider grin. “This might bring on an attack of musth in me.”

  “Drina will have a giggle out of that.”

  “Do Hathis giggle?”

  “You know, I don't think three generations of studying them has answered that question. Maybe that can be our great original contribution to the study of Hathis—Giggle-Patterns Among Hathis of the Logos Clan.”

  Schurman took his hand. There were worse ideas about what to do next, now that there was going to be a Logos Clan among the Hathis.

  McGregor

  Paul Di Filippo

  Paul Di Filippo presents Beatrix Potter’s beloved The Tale of Peter Rabbit (Frederick Warne & Co., October 1902) in a futuristic updating as it might have been written by Danish author Sven Hassel (1917- ), the ex-Wehrmacht trooper who is known for his fourteen graphically depressing German-viewpoint World War II novels (Legion of the Damned/De fordømtes Legion, 1953, The Bloody Road to Death/Jeg saa dem dö, 1977, etc, etc.). Or to be more accurate, a futuristic updating of the already-notorious joint Hassel/Potter parody, “Peter Rabbit – Tank Killer”, in The Book of Revelations by Mark Leigh and Mike Lepine (Arrow Books, October 1988). A parody of a
parody?

  A popular recent s-f theme has been the futuristic bioengineering of animals into sentient soldiers, who fight the humans’ wars while the humans loftily sit it out (see Forests of the Night by S. Andrew Swann, DAW Books, July 1993, to cite one example). In Di Filippo’s tale both the animals and the humans have been heavily biomodified into efficient sentient killing machines. Between the two, who would win? And does it matter worth a damn?

  1. The Tale of Peter Rabbit

  PETER Rabbit stubbed out his cigarette on the rock upon which he sat, sent the dead butt spinning with a flick of a stubby claw, and sighed.

  It was night. The fragrant country air around him carried cleanly the noises of noncultivar life, poignant cries, lonely calls, sly rustlings.

  Frogs, but no Jeremy Fisher.

  Owls, but no Mr. Brown.

  Badgers, but no Tommy Brock.

  Hedgehogs, but no Mrs. Tiggywinkle.

  These, his fellow splices, were penned, not free to roam as was he.

  Peter reached up to the tip of one long ear, the left. That ear had been illegally docked two years ago, shortly after Peter's escape from the Garden. This had been the only way to remove the silicrobe owner-tattoo, the Warne licensing mark, which had been injected at the ScheringPlough biofab facility, on behalf of McGregor's gembaitch, before Peter was shipped. Afterwards, the ear had been regenerated. But the new part had always felt foreign. Peter had a tendency to finger it when he was nervous, as he was now.

  His perch was high on a hill in the Lake District, near the village of Sawrey, in the western bioregion of the European Community. Below, the village was lit by the delicate glow of low-photonic reradiants. To the south Peter could see the grounds of the Beatrix Potter epcot, otherwise known as the Garden.

  How long ago his life there seemed.... He had spent only thirteen months in the Garden, but it had felt like forever. The silly skits, the gawping EC, NU, and CoPro tourists, the tasteless food—Through kinky proteins or rebel peptides, he had found himself totally unfit for his servitude.