By this time, all of Robert’s remaining forces had converged on his location, including the MK8 units, and he was able to take stock of what (and who) he had left. He needed someone with a certain skill, and he breathed a sigh of relief when he saw the familiar CASPer with the peace sign on its massive metal fist. “Hawkins, glad to see you’re still with us.”
“Nobody’s happier about that than me, sir,” a female voice replied.
“I have a task for you. Are you up to it?”
The CASPer raised its hand to its brow in salute. “Of course, sir.”
Robert had always prided himself on selecting candidates that were multi-skilled. In addition to being a damn fine pilot, he knew she was also an excellent linguist. “Are you familiar with the language here?”
“I studied what little was known about the planet’s languages on the way here.”
“So, you can speak this…whatever it is? I need to talk to the chief.”
“I can’t,” Hawkins replied. “But I can reverse engineer a comm unit to translate the chief’s words into English, kind of like a translation device. If the chief understands English, this ought to make it possible to have a conversation with him.”
“How long will that take?” Robert asked, clearly wanting to get on with things.
“It’s a simple command program,” Hawkins explained. “The language pack is downloadable. A few basic strings of code and about five minutes is all I need.”
“You make this work, and we’ll talk about bigger opportunities for you within the Guard when this is over.”
“Yes, sir, I’m on it,” Hawkins said.
As promised, Hawkins was done within a few minutes. The chief had been chained to a tree and surrounded by a ring of CASPers who stood guard with their backs to it. No one would be sneaking up on them. The comm unit had been strapped to the devil’s throat so it could pick up the sounds it made and translate them appropriately. The savage snarled and glared at them, telling them with its eyes all the things it would do to them if it managed to get free of the chains that held it captive.
Colonel Robert normally wasn’t intimidated by anyone or anything, but even he was a little hesitant to approach the monster. The chief seemed to pick up on his trepidation and howled to show its superiority even while restrained. Despite his misgivings, Robert stepped up to it and stared up at the beast, unwilling to back down. The creature went silent, realizing Robert wasn’t nearly as soft as he initially seemed. Then it howled again for good measure, baring its pointed teeth.
Robert unholstered his sidearm and rammed the barrel of the gun into the monster’s mouth, silencing it. The creature gagged on the taste of gunmetal. “I sincerely hope you can understand what I’m about to say,” Robert began. “If you make any of those sounds again I will put a bullet into your skull. I’d like to talk to you, but I can’t do that if you’re barking at the moon. I also don’t want you calling in reinforcements we’ll have to deal with. Now, I’m about to take the gun out of your mouth and let you choose whether I put an extra hole in your skull or not.”
The chief eyed him warily as he withdrew the gun’s barrel. This time it didn’t make a sound. It simply glared at him, no doubt imagining all the ways it could tear him apart.
Robert nodded, satisfied with the response. He holstered his sidearm. “Anything special I need to do to make this setup work, Hawkins?”
“No, sir,” Hawkins said. “Just talk and see if it’ll respond. The comm unit will do the rest.”
Robert stepped in close to the savage, and studied him for a moment before speaking. “I am Colonel Robert,” he said. “I am the leader of this group.”
The chief made a series of grunts and guttural noises that the translation unit transformed into robotic words. “Who you are is of no concern to me.”
“It works,” Hawkins said, sounding just as surprised as anyone else.
“You understand me,” Robert said to the creature.
“I understand enough, but choose not to foul my tongue with your language.”
“You are intelligent.”
“Some would say so,” the chief said. “Your kind does not. Why else would you come here and declare war?”
“We have a job to do here,” Robert explained.
“Your job is to kill my people, and this is our home,” the savage replied. “Do you truly think we will simply roll over and die?”
“I am tempted to kill you now,” Robert said. “You have cost me a lot of money and the lives of many men.”
“You speak of lost lives,” the chief grunted. “Have you looked at the riverbed and seen how many of my kind lie unburied?”
“We could make a deal of sorts,” Robert suggested.
“We do not deal. We only kill. We will kill you.”
“That’s not a wise thing for you to say. After all, I have you chained up and at my mercy.”
“I am not afraid to die. Your threat is an empty one.”
Robert unsheathed his knife and approached the chief with a gleam in his eye. “Is it now?” he asked. “This will kill you much slower than any bullet. I can make it last a long time.”
“Do what you must,” the monster said. “I will transcend this life and live another.”
“You are obviously afraid of us. You called off your troops when the clouds of firegel vapor became too much for you to withstand.”
The beast laughed. “That is not at all what happened.”
“So why did everyone stop fighting?”
“They stopped fighting because they heard a cry greater than mine.”
“Greater than yours?” Robert asked.
The creature snarled and smiled a toothy grin. “You will discover soon enough.”
“But you are the chief.”
The creature howled. “I never said that. You did.”
“So, what are you?”
“A general in the army of my lord. Nothing more.”
“And the chief of your people?”
“Is more terrible than me in every way. You will wish for death if he finds you.”
Robert raised his own comm unit in haste. “Rai, Peterson, can you hear me?”
At first no one responded. Then the comm channel was a mixture of static, gunfire, and frantic voices. “We’re almost at your location,” Rai said. “But we aren’t alone. The natives are after us in numbers you wouldn’t believe. They’re coming right at us, and there are so many we’ll never get out of this alive. We need to get off this planet.”
“Estimate your distance from us,” Robert said.
“Only a couple of klicks,” Rai said. “But we’re moving fast. If we stop, we’re dead.”
“Roger that. Stay alive and take out as many of those savages as you can on the way. We’ll lock and load and prepare to provide reinforcements.”
“Ten-four,” Rai said. “Oh, and there’s just one more thing.”
“What is that?” Robert asked.
“That savage you’ve captured…he’s not the force driving these creatures.”
“I just found out,” Robert said. “How do you know?”
“Because the guy you’ve got sounds like a Boy Scout compared to the thing leading the never-ending wave of beasts chasing us.”
* * *
Rai led her remaining CASPers through the woods of Zala IV. Only six, including her own, had survived the battle in the riverbed and the insanity that followed. All of them were beginning to run low on power and ammo. She didn’t have to look back to see the horde of savages chasing her; their howls and snarls were a cacophony echoing through the woods, reminding her they were hot on her trail.
One of the CASPers with her paused, turning to face the horde that chased them as its shoulder launchers spat out a belt’s worth of K-bombs. The bombs detonated in a series of blasts that shook the ground. The creatures died by the dozens with each explosion. For each creature that fell, though, hundreds more rushed forward to take its place.
A vol
ley of spears flew at the CASPer. Its pilot did his best to dodge the bulk of the onslaught, but some of the spears found their mark. One penetrated its left shoulder, the tip protruding from the rear of the suit’s shoulder blade. Another entered the suit through its knee, piercing it, its tip thudding into the dirt and pinning the CASPer to the ground. Still another sparked as it dealt a glancing blow to the CASPer’s right side. Rai knew that the CASPer and its pilot were lost. Its fate had been sealed with the spear that had crippled its leg.
Ripping her gaze away from the damaged suit and doomed pilot, Rai focused on running for her life. They weren’t that far from the coordinates Robert had given her. If they could just keep it together a little longer, they could at least join up with the other mercs and give these savages some payback before they died.
She spotted the edge of the encampment ahead. Drake stood above a firing line of dug-in infantry with several CASPers spaced out along the line as support. The wiry little killer was actually smiling at the sight of the horde following her. To judge by the glee on his face, he couldn’t wait to join the fray. Rai thought he might reconsider how he felt when he saw just how many of the savages there were.
Rai poured on the speed, pushing her CASPer to its limits. The heavy metal legs pounded the ground beneath her as she ran. Her suit and those of the others with her were all out of jump juice, or she would have simply taken to the air and leaped for the relative safety that awaited her behind the firing line Robert’s Guard had set up.
Drake and his men held their fire until she and the others were clear, then opened up on the horde of savages. When they did open fire, it was like Hell itself reaching upward to envelop the earth.
Colonel Robert held nothing back. Most of the men along the firing line were carrying K-bomb launchers and other anti-armor weapons. They unleashed a staggering amount of firepower at the savages. Tripod-mounted weapons raked their lines of fire over the forward ranks of the approaching swarm as missiles and grenades streaked into the main body of the horde behind them. Explosions rippled through the massed savages, killing many, maiming others, and setting some on fire. The bodies of the savages covered the ground and drenched it with alien blood.
The barrage of fire was so intense, and so powerful, that it was enough to break the savages’ charge. The bulk of the devils stopped short of the firing line, many of them turning to flee back into the woods they’d come from. The few hundred that didn’t run continued to press forward but were quickly cut to pieces by the precision fire from the professional mercs. Then as suddenly as it had begun, the battle was over.
Rai looked out at the sea of corpses littering the small clearing between the firing line and the woods beyond it. There were severed body parts everywhere. The bodies of some of the savages who’d been on fire when they died continued to burn. The air was filled with smoke and the odor of burning hair and flesh. It took all her will not to vomit inside her suit as her CASPer dropped to one knee and she tried to catch her breath.
The soldiers of Robert’s Guard were busy reloading their weapons as Drake came sauntering over to greet her.
“Lieutenant Rai, yes?” the little killer asked her, looking at the ID numbers and rank painted on the armor of her suit.
“Drake,” Rai rasped, “I never thought I’d be glad to see you.”
Drake laughed, smiling at her. “Are Peterson and his men with you?”
“No,” Rai answered. “They didn’t make it to the rally point. They must have run into trouble and got cut off.”
Drake nodded his acknowledgement. “We’ve got a makeshift basecamp set up past those trees there,” he pointed behind her. “I suggest you get your suit reloaded and recharged before those things hit us again.”
Rai was shaking her head inside her suit. “You don’t understand. You may have broken their charge, but they aren’t going to give you the time you think they are. There’s something with them.”
“Something?” Drake repeated the word almost as if he were mocking her.
“I don’t know what it is Drake,” she snarled, “But it’s big, and I promise you, when it gets here you’re not going to be able to stop it. I’m not sure anything can.”
Drake gave her a look that clearly said he thought she’d lost it. “That’s my problem, Lieutenant. Now, get going and tend to your suit. Colonel Robert will want to see you ASAP, as you’re the only surviving officer of the Hellhounds.”
The words hit her hard. She had known that Hendershot was likely dead, but hearing it from Drake drove the reality home. Colonel Hendershot, the old man, had always seemed immortal to her. She felt tears welling up in her eyes and fought them away. There was no time for weakness.
Rai took one final look at Drake’s firing line, hoping it would hold. She said a prayer before heading off into the makeshift camp beyond it; she didn’t think it would.
* * *
Leaving her suit with her fellow Hellhound survivors so they could power and arm it, Rai went to see Colonel Robert. He was pacing back and forth nervously near a tech who was working with a comm unit, apparently attempting to contact the ships for extraction.
Colonel Robert noticed her as she approached him. She stank of sweat, and her muscles ached from the hell she’d endured. If the man thought she was going to greet him with a smile, he could forget it. This was as good as it got.
“Lieutenant Rai,” Colonel Robert said, “It’s good to have you with us. I see you’re still in one piece. That’s more than can be said for a lot of our forces.”
“Any luck making contact with the ships, sir?” she asked. “The sooner we get off this rock the better.”
He shook his head. “Tigh, here, is doing all he can, but so far we haven’t been able to get a signal because of the blasted EM storms. We will though. It’s just a matter of time.”
“So, you’ve decided not to honor our contract?” Rai asked, hoping that he had. “Our forces have been hit hard.”
“I didn’t say that,” Colonel Robert frowned. “These things have hurt us, and bad, but we’re still in the fight. My unit has built a reputation, and we didn’t do that by quitting.”
“Are we still in the fight? Really?” Rai questioned him. “Because it feels like we’re getting slaughtered left and right for no good reason.”
“We’re not dead yet,” he pointed out. “And we’ve got that bastard over there. That’s got to count for something.”
Colonel Robert gestured toward a group of CASPers standing guard over a hulking savage who could only be their chief. The monstrosity struggled and writhed in an attempt to free itself from the chains that bound it, but it was tied fast to the tree.
“He’s not in charge,” Rai said. “Trust me on this.”
“He is their chief,” Colonel Robert told her. “Even if he isn’t their leader.”
“I’ve seen the thing that is, sir, and trust me, you don’t ever want to,” Rai shuddered remembering her brief encounter with the creature. “But I don’t think you’ll have a choice.”
“I think we can use this one,” Colonel Robert said, hooking a thumb in the chief’s direction. “If anybody has the intel we need, it’ll be him. The only problem is how to interrogate him. We haven’t been successful so far.”
“Hendershot used to say that everyone had a pressure point that would make them spill every secret they knew. You just have to find it. The chief here is no different.”
“Hendershot taught you the art, didn’t he?” Robert asked.
Rai nodded. “I watched him drag information out of the most hardened, stubborn informants. In the end, they always talked when Hendershot questioned them, if he had enough time.”
Colonel Robert saw the change in Rai’s demeanor at the mention of her commanding officer. “Hendershot was a good man,” he offered. “I’m sorry for your loss.”
Rai studied him carefully, unwilling to allow herself to cry. She couldn’t show weakness now that she was in charge of the Hellhounds. “Thank yo
u,” she said. “He was.”
“I’m honestly surprised any of you Hellhounds are still alive,” Robert continued. “It’s a testament to Hendershot’s leadership that you are. It’s also reason enough to keep going here. We can’t let his death, and the deaths of so many others, be in vain.”
“Vengeance,” Rai said, testing the word like a delicacy that’s better the longer it is savored.
“Wouldn’t you like to get back at these devils for what they stole from you?”
Rai thought about Hendershot. She thought about Kylie. Granted, they had both signed up for this life and knew the risks. However, that didn’t make the loss of her friends any easier to bear.
A white-hot anger bubbled up inside her, welling over at the thought of eradicating these savages and making them pay for what they’d taken from her. “I want to do whatever is necessary to make this right for Hendershot, for Kylie, and for all the other friends I’ve lost on this godforsaken planet.”
“Then we fight,” Robert said. “The Guard may be a much different kind of unit than the Hellhounds, but we have the same goal here.”
“You always did underestimate us, Colonel,” Rai said. “We may never have had the resources that your Guard does but…”
Colonel Robert waved off what she was saying. “Not the time or place to get into that, Lieutenant. What matters is that we’re united in our cause, and united in our course of action. What I need right now is for you to take a shot talking to that thing tied to the tree over there. Maybe you’ll have some luck where I haven’t. I’ve heard you have certain…abilities…when it comes to interrogation. There are stories about you. Stories that I haven’t been able to completely discount. Hendershot, it seems, was a skilled teacher, and you apparently learned those lessons well.”
“Okay,” Rai said. “I’ll see what I can do.”
“But first, I need to know about this thing you say is really their leader,” Colonel Robert stopped her as she started toward the chief. “He can wait another few minutes.”
Rai started to reply when she heard something that chilled her to the bone. It was the roar of thousands of savages crying out in fear and the splintering crackle of trees being snapped in half as the god of Zala IV approached.
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