“Fu—!” I didn’t finish the syllable before I tumbled up through the clouds, flailing through gray mist.
FIVE
THE BARRAGE’S EXPLOSIONS cartwheeled me up, then tumbled me down, crashing through vine-choked branches. I wound up swinging by one booted foot snared in a vine noose, fifteen feet up a tree.
I groaned. Eternad hard shell protects the wearer from most impacts. And the underlayer absorbs shock. A GI can get stomped like a roach, yet crawl away to fight another day. But under my armor I would be purple and lumpy for a week.
Below me, Aud Planck lay, facedown in the mud and still.
“Aud? You okay?”
Nothing.
I drew my trench knife, fumbled it, then twisted up and sawed the vine that wrapped my trapped foot. I dropped headfirst fifteen feet, splash-landed on one shoulder, then crawled to Aud.
“Aud? You okay?”
He turned his head to me, stared past me.
While he stared, I triaged him. No broken bones or significant bleeding, so far as I could tell. But, by the blank look in his eyes, his gong had been rung like Big Ben.
Beyond my vision, machine gun and cannon rounds crackled every few seconds, like the last kernels in an ogre’s popcorn machine.
I said, “Aud, we gotta move, buddy.”
He stared past me, concussion-blank, as I dragged him to his feet. We shuffled, Aud hopping on one foot, leaning against my shoulder, back into the clearing where the Kodiak squadron had been. Aud’s left leg wasn’t broken, but he winced each time he tried to put weight on the ankle.
We sheltered flat in the weeds, staring at five blackened heaps of gnarled metal as they smoldered under the rain. The last of their cannon and machine gun rounds cooked off as I peered at the hulks. A turret had blown off, and lay tilted upside down in the mud like a bowl filled with burnt bacon.
I smelled burnt hair and flesh, squeezed my eyes shut, and balled my fists. A soldier’s lot is to die young and unexpectedly, which is cruel. But for a commander, friendly fire casualties are cruelest, because there’s no place to direct your rage but into your own gut.
The odd thing about this incident was that normal battlefield concussion and shrapnel bothers Kodiaks no more than thrown rocks, yet this squadron had been wiped out by five rounds.
I left Aud to sit still in the reeds while I picked around the wrecks, as close as I could get to the metal as it steamed in the rain. A neat hole as wide as a human head was punched in what remained of each Kodiak’s dorsal armor, near the turret.
I kicked mud and swore. When the misdirected fire mission had been called onto us, the distant gunners’ tubes had already been loaded with pillbox-clearing smart penetrators. As the five shells dove into the clearing, each had homed on one of the five Kodiaks’ mass and heat, penetrated its back armor, then sprayed a jet of molten copper into the Kodiak’s gut. Crewmen not immolated instantly got crushed by the blast when the Kodiak’s ammunition detonated.
Remaining outside the slider had saved our lives. The smart shell had struck the Command Kodiak’s thinner back armor four feet to our right as we knelt on the slider’s back. The shell had speared into the Kodiak’s guts, then detonated and vaporized everything and everyone inside. But we simply got blown off the slider like leaves.
I held Aud’s face between my palms and asked, “What day is it?”
He stared back at me, still concussion symptomatic.
A stray rifle round buzzed through the foliage alongside us. The offensive, and the enemy troops that were being bulldozed ahead of it like angry sand, were closing on us.
Given Aud’s injuries, we couldn’t outrun the Iridians. The only weapons we carried were trench knives, and Aud’s sidearm. I couldn’t assume hardened, vengeful Iridians carrying assault rifles would accept a surrender, even from VIPs, when a couple quick head shots made more sense.
In the distance, voices shouted orders. The enemy would be on us within minutes.
SIX
I STAGGERED, shoring Aud up under one arm, to the wrecked slider nearest the clearing’s edge. A blackened corpse hung from the blown-out rear-bay hth=„atch. I shoved the corpse aside, shoved Aud into the bay, then tugged the corpse back in behind us to block the hatch. Its hand broke loose at the wrist like charcoal.
“Terrible,” Aud muttered, then he slumped against me.
I jostled him. “No sleeping with a concussion.”
We huddled in the dark, burned-out bay until I heard footsteps and the rattle of rifle-sling buckles on wooden stocks.
An Iridian-accented voice shouted, “They’re slowing behind us, sir!”
“Unless the bastards start pushing forward again, we’ll dig in here for the night.”
Lucky us.
“Should we inspect these war wagons of theirs? If any of the bastards are still alive . . .” Metal scraped metal as the Iridian GI chambered a round.
I swallowed. These men had spent three years in trench warfare hell, and today the Tressens had made it worse. Surrender? We would stand a better chance if we surrendered to rattlesnakes.
“Nobody survived inside those. Sketch the wreckage. Maybe intelligence can figure what killed these.”
“Sir, I don’t—”
“Use ration wrappers, if you don’t have a notebook.”
Beside me, Aud twitched. “Who are you?”
“Quiet!” I hissed in his ear, and pressed him against the still-warm hull plates.
He elbowed me. “Let me up. I’ll be late to Formation.”
I jammed my gauntleted palm across his rambling mouth, so hard that he thrashed for breath.
Outside the wreckage, footsteps stopped alongside us.
I held my breath, which just made my heartbeats drum louder in my ears. I was sure they could be heard over the rain.
“Do I need to sketch inside it, too, sir? I mean . . .”
Crap. I felt in the dark for the holster on Aud’s belt, then unsnapped its flap.
Rain drummed on the hull.
A sigh. “Let the dead rest, Corporal. First we get the nets up, then you sketch.”
The footsteps sloshed away.
By the clock that plodded inside my brain, we huddled in the bay, shielded by our dead sentry, all day. My ’Puter insisted that we lay there for thirty-one minutes.
By then, I had heard no man-made sound, except the distant ring of entrenching tools against rock, for ten minutes. Aud was making sense again. Rainwater funneling through rents in the hull had flooded our hideout six inches deep, and kept rising.
I extended my fingercam, snaked it around the corpse, and my corpsepeeked out. The Iridians had moved off sixty yards away from the wrecks, where they were digging in. Their attention was focused on the live Tressen threat to their front, not the dead behind them.
We wormed past the corpse, then ducked behind the wreckage.
Aud said, “Jason, we have to get away from here.”
“Sure. We’ll cross the open ground after dark.”
“Now.” Aud drew his pistol in the fading light, then counted his spare magazines by fingering his belt pouch.
I grabbed his wrist, and pointed at the Iridians. “There’s at least a company out there!”
He shook his head, tilted it to the sky, then blinked away the falling drops. “The pistol’s not for them. We have to get away from these bodies. That’s why the Iridians moved off from here to set their night perimeter. But unless we find oilwood before dark, it won’t matter.”
Well, he knew his planet, and I didn’t. Hair stood on my neck, and I swiveled my head. “What should I watch for?”
“My backside. There’s no time to educate you. Just follow me closely.” Then he double-timed, crouching, through the mud and into the trees, avoiding the gaze of the Iridians and also avoiding any patch of water that looked big enough to hide a bus.
We picked our way back toward the Tressen front lines, which had stabilized for the night, but the light faded while we were still in
limbo. Aud slowed to a walk at the edge of a solid clearing ringed with fat, brown brush. He drew a Tressen trench knife as long as a machete, then started hacking down brush bundles and tossing them over his shoulder into the clearing.
My knife was too short to cut brush, and I wouldn’t have known which brush to cut anyway. So I stood panting, hands on hips, turned my head inside my helmet, sucked my water bladder dry, then looked around.
The sixty-foot plants that choked and overhung the clearing weren’t trees, though they looked like fat, scaly-trunked palms. They threw off spores, not seeds, and resembled what a paleobotanist would call Earthly lycopods. Tressel displayed conditions parallel to conditions on Earth during the upper-middle Paleozoic. No bird chirps echoed through those trees, just as there had been no chirping birds during Earth’s Paleozoic. Six-inch long insects droned. They looked like dragonflies, but weren’t.
Parallel evolution sounded as linear as geometry, but actually kinked and swirled like a Jackson Pollock painting. Exploring Tressel and the other Earthlike Outworlds was like paging through an old photo album. You turned the page and saw someone who looked like grandma. But when you looked closer, she was just a chimp in a dress.
But whether the Tressen Barrens were an upper-middle Paleozoic swamp, or just a malformed twin, they were no place to honeymoon. There were no flowering plants, so the landscape offered two color choices, spinach green or mud brown. The only home cooking was roast tetra, which tasted like warm dirt. It rained most of every day, and drinking the water turned your colon into a garden hose.
I sighed. Then I sidestepped down to the water’s edge, extend ps edge,ded the suction tube from my gauntlet’s index finger, and squatted so I could dip my finger in the swamp.
I rolled my head on my neck, closed my eyes and moaned. A guilty pleasure of infantry Eternads is that the water purifier’s pump, which nestles between your shoulder blades, whirs you a little back massage while it sucks muddy soup up its intake tube.
When I opened my eyes, I saw, four feet out in the water, a fuzzy, lemon-yellow worm as small as my thumb, rippling the water as it wriggled on the surface.
Probably tetras ate them, snapping them up with their tongues the way frogs did.
I leaned forward and chinned my optics to record a worm snapshot for the exobiologists back home.
At the edges of my vision, another ripple flickered four feet to my left, and another four feet to my right.
Maybe the worms swam in broods, like ducklings.
“Jason!” Aud screamed like my hair was on fire.
SEVEN
AUD STARTLED ME so that I rocked back on my heels.
In the same instant, the ripples to my right and left exploded. From the spray, two rigid, segmented black arms, as big as oak limbs, each ending in a two-foot long lobster claw, scissored me chest-high.
If it hadn’t been for Aud’s yell, my helmet would have been crushed like a hammered olive. As it was, the stress register on my helmet display flashed yellow. My torso shell would crack within thirty seconds if the squeeze continued.
The beast that held me lifted its head out of the water, flat and black and bigger than a manhole cover. From the manhole’s top bulged two serving-bowl sized gray eyes, each faceted with compound lenses like a split beehive. The yellow lure that had wiggled in front of me wobbled on a fleshy stalk that rose between the large eyes, and was flanked by two round simple eyes like glistening black stones. This monster had hunted me like snapping turtles with worm-shaped tongues hunted back on Earth, but it was no turtle.
With me pincered, the scorpion swam backward, dragging me toward deep water.
I dug in my heels, but they slid down the muddy bank. When the scorpion undulated, its spade-shaped tail fluke broke the surface. Its tail and head were fifteen feet apart.
Water lapped around my chestplate as I tore at one pincer with both hands, and failed to budge it. I kicked the head, and something caught on my foot. Probably the monster’s open jaw.
The water beneath me deepened, so I no longer could feel the muddy bank with my feet or fingers.
Brown water closed over my faceplate.
Bang.
The scorpion half-rolled, and my head came up out of the water for an instant.The„
Bang. Bang. Bang.
The scorpion’s grip loosened, then re-tightened, with each shot.
Bang. Bang.
My armor’s stress indicator faded back to green, and the pincers slipped away. I thrashed to the surface. Aud, smoking pistol in one hand, reached with his other hand and dragged me by my backpack loop onto the bank. Then he waded back out, grabbed the dead scorpion’s tail fluke, and wrestled it until the beast’s eight rear limbs lay anchored on the mud bank.
I sat, arms on my knees, in the mud, popped my faceplate and sucked air in ripping sobs.
Aud staggered up next to me, sat and gasped, too.
Five minutes later, I croaked. “Thanks.”
“S’nothing.”
“Nothing?” I ran my eyes from the flat tail fluke down the segmented tail. Out in the shallows, the scorpion’s pincers poked above the water like giant broken-toothed combs.
Aud shrugged. “Just a sixth-molt female. No reason for you to know that the yellow wiggler means ‘run away.’ But every Tressen child knows it from the time his parents start telling bedtime stories.”
“Why did you drag the body back up here?”
Aud waded out alongside the carcass, knee deep. Grunting, he heaved the tail section up like a rolled carpet, hacked at the beast with his trench knife, then stood and smiled. In one hand he raised what looked like a sack of translucent ping pong balls. “Egg roast tonight!”
Rain pattered the sodden vegetation again.
“Aud, we can’t make a fire.”
He pointed at his brush pile. “We can. Oilwood will burn even in a full rain barrel.”
Especially on Tressen. Like on late-Paleozoic Earth, Tressen’s swamp plants cranked out so much oxygen that the atmosphere was fire-friendly. I pointed back in the direction from which we had come. “I mean Iridians will spot a fire. I’d rather be a cold fugitive than a dead POW.”
“Jason, Iridians are our least worry.” Aud pointed at the carcass. “You saw the enormous eyes on that beast. Scorpions hunt submerged during daylight. At night, they hunt onshore.” He fingered his ammunition pouch. “I can wound perhaps two more. Without a fire’s light to discourage them, we’ll attract a dozen before the sun’s two hours down. How many can you wrestle?”
I rubbed the new row of dents in my chestplate, and swallowed.
Then I scooped an armload of brush onto Aud’s pile. “I’ll take my eggs over easy.”
An hour later I sat elbows-on-knees in the dark, with my back to our fire. Oilwood cracked and sizzled like bacon, while warmth soaked through my armor’s backplates.
Facing away from the fire, I chinned my optize=inned mcs to night passive and zoomed on the object on the bank, twenty yards away. The Barrens linked to the sea, and the outgoing tide had now completely exposed the scorpion that had nearly killed me. It slumped in the mud like a flattened lobster fifteen feet long. Longer if someone tugged its forelimbs out in front of it, like Superman holding pliers. I shuddered inside my armor. That someone wasn’t going to be me.
Aud tossed a pebble at the scorpion carcass. “Do you have these in your home?”
I wiggled my index finger. “Our biggest scorpions are this long.”
He poked me in my side, grinning. “And sergeants serve privates breakfast in bed.”
“No, really.” I tapped my earpiece. “I think there’s a translation problem. Our big scorpions are extinct. Actually, barely relatives of our little modern scorpions. Closer related to what we call horseshoe crabs.”
My earpiece ticked as the translator program hunted, then continued. Tressen had a word for “shoe,” of course, but not for “horse,” because horses were millions of years down Tressel’s evolution trail.
I said, “Today, reptiles—animals like tetras, but bigger—have replaced eurypterids in the swamp predator niche.”
“Tiny scorpions. Ferocious tetras!” He shook his head and chuckled. “I needed a laugh.”
“We call them crocodiles. I can show you pictures. I wouldn’t lie to you, Aud.”
Orphan's Alliance Page 3