by K. J. Coble
“Medic!” she hollered as she reached the clearing. “Somebody, help!”
A thin haze draped over the hollow containing the aid station, concealing the worst of the carnage until the Station ripped the azure sky and painted everything in painful detail.
There had obviously been a mass of tents near the middle of the ground, but the canvas and piping had been stripped down for bandages and tourniquets and makeshift stretchers. The surgeons worked out in the open now, laser scalpels slicing apart squirming flesh for all to see.
Sandy took a step and nearly tripped. The wounded carpeted the ground from one end of the clearing to the other, packed together in a writhing mass too thick to step over.
But that was just what the fleeing guerrillas were doing, scrambling over the prone forms, trampling some into the muck and blood despite shrill screams and pleas. Partisans with white armbands struggled to halt them, keep them away from the hurt. The medics were pitifully few in the sea of maimed and dying.
“Shit...maybe we ought to keep going...” Sten shifted Runt around a bit on his back, bringing a tight curse from the injured man.
“No.” Sandy couldn’t bear the thought. Cally was so heavy now. “Medic, please! Please!”
“Hold on, dammit! I’m coming!” A shorter main in blood-matted fatigues with the insignia of an officer appeared. His blonde hair was tangled and crusted with filth and his blue eyes were cold. He touched the side of Cally’s ghost-white face, frowned, and shook his head. “She’s dead, soldier. I’m sorry. Put her over by the trees and save us some room.”
“What?” Sandy couldn’t help herself, dropped Cally to the ground less gently than she intended. Cally’s synthe-leathers were chewed and black with wounds. Her face was waxy where it wasn’t smeared with dirt. Her eyes stared without light.
Sandy trembled. Can’t be...she was alive a few minutes ago...I thought she was being quiet, being a good girl... She looked at the Doctor. “Check her again!”
He was examining Runt’s thigh and didn’t even look at her. He shook his head and thumbed towards the opposite side of the hollow where hovertrucks and skiffs were taking on living cargo. “This wrap isn’t great, but it will have to do. See if you can get him on one of those, if they’re still taking anyone.”
Sten looked at Sandy. “I’m going.”
Sandy nodded. She knew he wouldn’t be coming back for her. She saw the Doctor beginning to turn away.
“Doctor,” Sandy snarled, reaching for her blastrifle, “check her again!”
He looked at her for a long moment, his face sagging under the resignation in his eyes. He looked past her, saw someone, and pointed to her and Cally.
“Cynthia, take a look at this one.”
Sandy turned slowly, then found herself whirled into familiar arms with a cry of relief that sounded like home.
Cynthia felt warm and hard pressing against her face as she squeezed her to her chest. Sandy felt her last reserve crack and give and the tears poured onto her twin’s fatigue jacket. She wrapped her arms around her sister. She was so tired.
Cynthia pulled away and put her hands to the sides of Sandy’s face. Her eyes glistened as she smiled. “I prayed, I hoped. You’re alive!”
Sandy pulled off a glove and touched her fingertips to Cynthia’s lips, felt their warmth, their solidity like an electric shock. “Cynn...it’s all coming apart.”
The Station cut loose in a tight pattern of blasts and Cynthia ducked instinctively. “I know, sweety. I know. You have to listen to me, now, all right? All right?”
Sandy nodded without thought. Nothing felt real anymore.
“We have to get out of here. You have to trust me, now. I know a way out, but we have to leave this place.” Her eyes hardened with something cold crystallizing behind them. The firm voice was Mother’s.
Sandy blinked and looked at Cally.
“She’s dead, Sandy. You have to believe me. There’s nothing you can do.” Cynthia pulled Sandy’s face to her, touching their foreheads together so Sandy saw nothing but her sister’s eyes. “Listen to me—”
Shouts of anger and direction tore Sandy’s gaze away again. Soldiers were filtering into the clearing, stumbling and dazed but armed and not quite panicked. A huge, ebony-skinned officer had the Doctor’s arm in his fist and was hollering into his face.
“You have to get everybody you can out of here! Screwheads are breaking through!”
The Station unleashed another barrage. As its thunder subsided, the nearing rumble of the fight spilled over the rise and into the hollow. Individual blasts and shouted orders were easily discernible. They had to be just beyond the hill.
“Sandy...”
The Doctor wiped his face, seemed indecisive for a moment. “All right. We’ll need ten minutes and every hovertruck we can—”
“No, Doctor. You have to go now.” The huge man yanked the medic close but his words were still audible. “We’re being overrun.”
The Doctor nodded, his eyes without focus, then pulled his arm from the officer’s grip and turned to stride into the midst of the chaos. “Listen! We are pulling out! Everyone who can still walk, make for the trees, head east. My people; make those who can’t be moved as...as comfortable as you can...”
A great moan rose from the hollow. The mobile wounded began picking themselves up and trudging away, some assisted by others. Those who couldn’t rise from the ground began screaming and pleading for help or salvation, some clawed and cursed at those leaving them behind. Their cries ground at Sandy’s sanity. Medics scrambled to distribute the last ampules of anesthetic from a chest. A few meters away a Shmali with mangled legs read from a battered journal, his lips moving as if in prayer. Behind him, a kneeling soldier loaded a pistol and put it gently into a sobbing woman’s hand. He touched her head with his lips and moved on.
“Let’s go, Sandy!” Cynthia pulled at Sandy’s arm.
Sandy wrenched free, rising towards the big officer, who looked to be trying to organize a scratch defense. Her vision pulsed red with fresh hatred and hurt. The blastrifle felt cool and ready in her grip.
“Sandy!”
Cynthia threw herself on Sandy’s back, clawing at armor plate and folds of synthe-leather. Sandy turned with her arm up as a shield from the flailing. Her twin’s fingernails raked unwittingly across her cheek in the struggle.
“Cynn, damn it, get off!”
“No! They’ll get you! They’ll get us all! Come with me—”
Sandy hurled Cynthia to the mud. For a moment, she looked at her sister’s shocked, wounded expression and felt something wail inside her. She cursed, wanted to explain. But Cynthia’s eyes held no understanding, didn’t even contain the urge to understand. There was only a frantic light. Sandy began to turn away.
Cynthia leapt to her feet and sprinted away. Sandy swore. She opened her mouth to shout after her twin but lost her voice in a wave of cold.
Cynthia was racing into the woods, moving uphill.
“Cynn...Cynn, wait!”
Moving west.
Sandy called again, beginning to trot after her, expecting her sister to realize her error. She went numb when she suddenly lost sight of her. A flicker of movement uphill. Sandy began to sprint. Poor girl, poor fool...she’s going right into...
Sandy’s legs pounded beneath her.
Please, please God...please let me find her before they do...
“AHH, SHEEEIIT!” COLE’S voice rose to a shriek. “That’s it! That’s it! Let me go!”
Pain ripped Cole back into consciousness as partisans dragged him up a hill and into cover behind a huge fallen tree. They set him down in the midst of a position overlooking a particularly narrow stretch of Granite Creek. There were a dozen other guerrillas there, frayed and scared-looking. Half of them were wounded.
The gray of wood smoke mingled with and began to swallow tendrils of yellow below as gas settled in low points. The air held a sour tang, but it wasn’t so bad on the hill. The thunder of bat
tle shuddered in the woods to the north and south, just beginning to creep around behind, but not to their front. Not yet.
“Everbody’s dead,” one of the guerrillas said in a voice too weary to sound terrified. “What do we fucking do now?”
“They’ll be here any moment,” another of the partisans said, a Shmali who had helped pull Cole here. “We have to keep going.” He put his hand on Cole’s shoulder.
“No!” Cole shoved the hand away. That was a bad idea, the motion causing things to shift in his guts, things that popped and tore. He winced, his vision blurred in a wave of agony and near-blackout. He tasted blood in his mouth.
“We have to—” The Shmali reached for him again.
“Keep your damned hands off me!”
Cole’s right leg ached but he couldn’t feel the left one. He tried to move it and tightened up in roaring pain. The knee was shattered, bone shards slicing muscle and meat when he tried to flex the joint. Cole relaxed. Shit...this is it...didn’t really expect it... He was surprised to find he wasn’t scared, just tired and angry. And sorry.
“How many of you can keep going?” Cole asked the partisans. Nine raised their hands, though one hobbled girl was probably questionable. Cole nodded. “All right, leave your weapons and ammo with the rest of us and get out of here.”
“But...they can’t leave us,” said one of the badly hurt ones, an older man who probably shouldn’t have been here in the first place. “You can’t—”
“I’m staying here, aren’t I?” Cole shot back at him. That seemed to comfort the old fellow a bit.
The partisans began stripping off weapons and, in some cases, everything but their clothes. They didn’t wait for an order or even each other. As soon as they lightened their loads to their satisfaction, they were gone.
The Shmali knelt at Cole’s side, setting a pair of grenades, a spare charge pack and a .45 caliber pistol by his leg, then handing him his blastrifle.
“There’s a pack in there,” the Shamli said. His mouth opened and closed a couple times. “I don’t have the human words but—” He leaned forward, touched Cole’s head and spoke a flurry of phrases in his native tongue. Then he, too, was scrambling off into the woods.
Cole took a long breath and struggled to prop himself up with his back to the uprooted tree. The position seemed to make some of the pain go away. Shafts of sunlight pierced the forest canopy and the smoke, warm on Cole’s face. He thought of summer days with Kat at his side and the kids playing on grass.
A thought rushed through him. Maybe, if he just bound the leg and pulled himself up, he could drag his way back to an aid station, maybe get some help, maybe... He savagely thrust the thoughts down. Paralyzing fear lay not far behind such fantasy and Cole couldn’t afford that. Not now.
The ravine below was fairly open. The Korvans wouldn’t cross there, under this good position. No, they would use the terrain, would sweep around to either flank. He told the youngest of the other three, a boy whose leg was a stump of soiled bandages below the knee, to take up position behind a pair of insect mounds. He had the older man settle in behind him at the gnarled end of the fallen tree.
“What about her?” the kid asked, jacking a round into the chamber of his drum-fed submachine gun.
Cole glanced at the third guerrilla, a gaunt woman whose eyes were glazed with pain. Her breaths came long and rattling.
“She’ll be dead in a few minutes. Leave her be.”
“Movement!” the old man whispered.
Cole put the blastrifle to his shoulder and lowered his helmet visor. Damage to the helm left holograms hazy and broken, but adequate.
Icons of movement glittered to the left, where the Korvans had already crossed the creek, were out of sight, coming up a steep part of the hill where there was a lot of dead ground. They would be very close when they came into contact. Cole glanced right, over the edge of the tree trunk. The Korvans there were less subtle, sweeping uphill in a thin line from tree to tree.
Tight bursts spat from the kid’s submachine gun, then a long one, yellow muzzle blasts fluffing dirt and foliage. The old man began firing wildly behind Cole, shouting something, perhaps a political slogan.
The kid’s weapon clicked empty and he swore, reaching for a reload. Cole fired over him, white energy lancing down at snatches of motion. The boy got a fresh drum slapped on, jerked back the slide and blazed into the forest again. Cole saw a Korvan flinching away, a jet of crimson speckling the undergrowth.
The kid barked in triumph. A flurry of cyan tore through him a second later, cutting off the cheer and his life.
Cole reached for the grenades, primed and tossed one, primed and tossed the second. Blasts of fire ripped the lower hill, casting clods of dirt and smoldering leaves skyward. Something screamed below, a hoarse, throttled-animal sound.
The firing behind Cole stopped. He glanced at the old man, still there, leaned against the tree with his blastrifle ready. His head was gone. Tatters of smoke drifted from the shriveled stump of his neck. The wounded woman behind him had stopped breathing.
Energy bolts exploded above Cole. He pulled in tight as sparks and burning wood chips showered him. More blasts ravaged the dead kid’s body. Cole heard movement, behind him and close, very close, a skittering not unlike animals on the roof of his old house.
The warning light on his blastrifle blinked for a reload. The last charge pack lay at his side on a chunk of stone. The pistol lay beyond it. Cole picked up the pistol and aimed it at the charge pack.
Like anyone trained in the use of blaster weapons, Cole had heard the horror stories of fragments or bullets or whatever damaging a charge pack and disrupting its stasis field. The infinitesimally small shard of antimatter meant to accelerate particle streams to the speed of light would, instead, detonate in a minor cataclysm. If struck just right.
Just a little closer, motherfuckers...
Cole waited, tried to keep his hand from shaking, tried not to think about how this could possibly be the end of him. He focused on Kat and the kids, smiled at their faces, their voices and their warmth. He’d be with them soon enough.
A Korvan stepped over the tree so quickly it seemed as though he had always been there, plasma rifle aimed at Cole. The Korvan seemed to pause, seemed confused by the wounded human’s stance.
Kat...
Cole pulled the trigger.
A globe of antimatter fire scooped Cole, the Korvans, and a small chunk of the hilltop into oblivion.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Zarven halted his battle-car on a low, bramble-choked rise and stood up in the turret to observe the heights rising one hundred meters ahead of him, huge and tangled in the mid-afternoon sunlight.
The western face of the hill was an unassailable wall of sandstone cliff that had given it its local worm nickname, “Crag Mountain”. Attack from north and east was possible, but the so-called mountain stretched eastward, throwing out steep spurs and blanketed in some of the worst spinebush and mature forest the Korvans had encountered.
Zarven picked out the thin lines of two of C Company’s platoons struggling uphill through thickets and worm fire. The worms had utilized the undulations of the terrain well, dug in to dips that made them nearly invisible, with their scattered heavy weapons ranging over what open ground there was. Zarven’s AI made an assessment from available data that the worm numbers were growing in front of him, stragglers filtering in to stiffen the position.
Flush with the earlier ease of the breakthrough, the Commandos’ dismay at being stalled began to sour their harmonics. Zarven frowned mentally as he pulled himself from the turret and leapt to the ground. He couldn’t let that sentiment spread. He had to keep the push going. Almost there, by the Imperative! Searing lances angled up from the worm Station, the mountain only a few kilometers away now.
“Tetzrak,” Zarven called across the Awareness to B Company’s commander, “things are getting tight in front of us again. You’re doing nothing but chasing tatters. I’m go
ing to send you every bit of hover transport we have, all the supply trucks. Empty the goods off them and load every Commando you can manage. Get them to me now!”
“Yes, HaustColonel. You, uh, realize that the lead supply column moving to us was shot up by a pocket of worm holdouts.”
Zarven ground his teeth in a decidedly un-Korvan gesture of anxiety. “You’re wasting time, telling me this, Tetzrak.”
“My Haust.” Tetzrak bowed out of Zarven’s mind.
It could be minutes. It could be hours. So little left in front of Zarven, but so little left to break it with. Damn that Station! A heavy artillery barrage or a starfighter sortie would be enough to scatter the worms like sparks from a bonfire.
Zarven looked southwest where forest fires turned the sky black. He felt across the Awareness. “Rovan, I’m running thin over here. I’ll have enough to punch through to the Station in a short while, but I—” Zarven cursed as pride made his harmonic tremble “—I need you to throw everything you have left at the worms. Don’t let them reinforce to my front.”
“Rovan is indisposed at the moment,” answered a voice Zarven was not surprised to hear. “But your request is noted.”
“My request is—” Zarven bit off his rage at Dramen-Singlo. “With respect, HaustCommandant, my request should be—needs to be—acted upon! The worms are juggling units back and forth. They’ve been doing it for days! The closer we force them together, the shorter their interior lines get. You can’t let them shift their reserves!”
“As much as I appreciate the lecture, Zarven, I don’t think you appreciate the situation to the south.” Dramen-Singlo’s tone was ragged with frustration. “The terrain is very poor, units have become hopelessly intermixed, and your breakthrough caused about as much confusion as it did good.”
“You can’t be arguing with me!” Zarven felt his harmonic go shrill. “You must do as I say! Hit them!”
“A HaustCommandant does not take orders from a Omniptorate lackey,” came Dramen-Singlo’s frosty reply.