When Duty Calls

by William C. Dietz

  “Don’t tell me. Let me guess,” Kobbi put in. The bugs have explosives on the bridge.”

  “Yes, sir,” Santana agreed. “Except that—” The sentence was interrupted by a resounding boom, quickly followed by a second, equally loud explosion, and numerous echoes. Both men turned to look at the bridge, but it was still there and apparently undamaged. That was when a dirty, unshaven Seebo hoisted himself up over the rail, spotted the officers, and made his way over. The clone had a big grin on his face. “It worked like a charm!” he said enthusiastically. “We cut both packages free at the same time, the bugs saw them fall, and blooey! The charges went off about halfway down.”

  Both of Kobbi’s bushy eyebrows rose. “And you are?”

  “This is Colonel Six,” Santana put in. “Colonel Six—this is General Kobbi.”

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” Kobbi said, as he turned to Santana. “The last time we met he was a general! You let him run around loose?”

  The last was directed at Santana, who smiled grimly. “So long as he behaves himself. And, truth be told, the colonel and his Seebos fought bravely over the last couple of days.”

  “I’m gratified to hear it,” Kobbi said gravely. “And I’m sure that will be taken into consideration during the court-martial. But this is now. Can we cross the bridge?”

  “Yes, sir,” Six said definitively. “It will hold.”

  “It better,” the little general growled. “I’m sending another quad across. Plus two squads of T-2s. Together they should be able to make short work of the battalion that’s coming up from the west. Alpha Company will remain in place until everyone is across. At that point you can bring those T-2s down off the ridges and cross the bridge. Once you’re on the west side, my people will blow the span. Any questions? No? Well done, Captain. . . . Thank you, Colonel. Let’s get to work.”

  Having been ordered to remain in place until the entire column passed over the bridge, most of Alpha Company played no part in the ensuing battle, as General Kobbi’s column went head-to-head with four Gantha tanks and a battalion of Ramanthian regulars. Their job was to keep the bugs from coming down off the ridges, which the T-2s managed to do, until Santana ordered them down onto the highway.

  Then, with Ramanthians right behind them, it was time for the legionnaires to withdraw to the far side of the span. A team of demolition experts from the 2nd REI had been left behind to drop the bridge into the river below, which the legionnaires did the moment some overeager chits attempted to cross.

  With that accomplished Santana led his company down the twisting, turning highway, and it wasn’t long before they began to see evidence of what had been a bloody battle. As expected, the Gantha tanks had been no match for two quads and a pack of voracious T-2s. Santana smiled grimly as Deker carried him past the partially slagged wrecks, one of which was topped by a Ramanthian tank commander who had been cooked in place. A wisp of smoke issued from his hooked beak as the company commander rode past.

  What lay beyond was even more gruesome. Because without any armor to protect them from the oncoming cyborgs, and with no avenue of escape, the Ramanthian infantry had been slaughtered. Those warriors who had been killed along the edges of the road lay where they had fallen, their bodies piled in drifts, but all facing the enemy. A testimony to their courage. The rest of the bugs, those who went down toward the center of the highway, weren’t recognizable anymore. Not after being crushed by quads and chopped to bits by a succession of tracked vehicles. The result was a bloody porridge made of equal parts blood, chitin, and snow. It was dark red at first, and thick with body parts, but began to thin somewhat as Alpha Company followed the road through a curve. The muck was merely pink by that time, and remained so as they passed through what had been a roadblock but was little more than scattered rubble by then.

  The highway turned white after that, as it entered a long series of switchbacks, leading down to the partially forested flatlands below. All of the allies were exhausted, most having fought for days with only hours of sleep, but Santana heard no complaints. The word was out by then. Ships were landing, and everyone who could walk, hop, or crawl to the LZ would be pulled out. And none of the soldiers wanted to be left behind.

  So the main column traveled day and night, and Alpha Company did likewise, until finally, after seventeen hours of nearly nonstop travel, Santana led his road-weary troops into what had already been dubbed “the doughnut,” by the mixed force of CVAs, legionnaires, and marines who were responsible for the facility.

  The doughnut, or landing zone (LZ), was located on mostly level ground and was approximately one mile across. Heavy equipment had been used to dig a deep ditch around the outer perimeter, intended to keep Ganthas out, and slow the Ramanthian infantry. Consideration had been given to building a berm along the circular ditch, which would have been relatively easy to do, given all the dirt removed from what some of the allies called “the moat.”

  But Kobbi nixed that idea, pointing out that once the allies were forced to fall back, the bugs would cross the ditch, and take cover behind the raised earthworks. So the dirt had been trucked into the landing zone’s interior, where a berm made sense, so the troops would have something to hide behind as the size of the overall force continued to shrink. And the evacuation process was already under way as a marine guide led Alpha Company across acres of heavily churned muck. “Look at that, sir!” Dietrich exclaimed, as repellers roared and a tramp freighter lowered itself into the so-called doughnut hole. “That ain’t no assault boat. . . . It’s an intersystem rust bucket!”

  “Who cares?” Santana countered, raising his voice so others could hear. “So long as it can fly. And you’ve been on our troopships. . . . I’ll take the freighter!”

  That got a laugh, and the comment soon made the rounds. But Santana was concerned. As the civilian ships continued to arrive, he saw that many of them were so old, or so small, that they made the first freighter look like a passenger liner. Still, something was better than nothing, or so the cavalry officer told himself as he was forced to confront the latest challenge.

  Alpha Company had been ordered to plug a hole on the east side of the doughnut between elements of the 13th DBLE and the 1st Marine Division, both of which had suffered heavy casualties in Yal-Am. In fact, most of their neighbors looked like hollow-cheeked scarecrows as they interrupted their work long enough to wave at the newcomers and shout friendly insults. There was plenty of work to do, because like the outfits to either side of it, the company was responsible for its own defenses. So with only a few hours of daylight left to them, it was important to dig firing pits, excavate communicating trenches, and fill newly created bunkers with ammo.

  Fortunately, the legionnaires could speed the process by replacing the graspers that the T-2s normally wore with “shovel hands” that enabled the cyborgs to dig trenches in a fraction of the time that a team of bio bods would require. So while Zolkin, Dietrich, and Six supervised work on company’s defenses, Santana took a moment to climb up onto one of the half-tracks and examine the area through his binos. To call the scene chaotic would have been an understatement.

  Ships of every possible description were circling the LZ, waiting for an opportunity to land. Then, when one of them finally managed to do so, a navy beach master was sent to find out how many people that particular vessel could accommodate. An unfortunate necessity caused by the fact that most of the civilians weren’t equipped to communicate with the military. Once the ship’s capacity had been determined, the petty officer would radio the information in, the correct number of stretcher parties were dispatched, and the loading process began.

  According to the orders issued by Kobbi, the wounded were to be evacuated first. Then, once they were gone, enlisted bio bods would go next, followed by the Legion’s cyborgs, and the officers. Immediately after each vessel lifted off, another yacht, lugger, or freighter would land, at which point the whole process began again. Or that was how everything was supposed to work.

&nbs
p; But as Santana and thousands of others looked on, what had once been a thirty-passenger lifeboat took off, and suddenly lost power. It was three hundred feet off the ground by then and fell like a rock. There was a loud boom as it hit. Followed by a ball of flame—and a towering column of black smoke. Fortunately, the boat crashed well outside of the main landing area, allowing the next vessel to settle in two minutes later.

  Meanwhile, out along the doughnut’s perimeter, work continued. Some sections were well fortified as enterprising officers, and in some cases senior noncoms, sought to strengthen their various positions. Other areas were not prepared either because the troops lacked good leadership or they were too exhausted to do more.

  Countless campfires pointed gray fingers up at the overcast sky, where hardworking recon balls zipped back and forth across the LZ, and stoic robots carried stretchers loaded with ammo from one location to another. All this made Santana thankful for the fact that he wasn’t a major, colonel, or, God forbid, a general, and therefore responsible for a larger slice of the insanity taking place around him.

  Santana was just about to leave his vantage point when a pair of Ramanthian fighters roared overhead. The cavalry officer tracked the aircraft as they circled the allied position, vectored in on the incoming rescue boats, and attacked two of them. One of the allied vessels exploded in midair, and rained flaming debris onto the troops below, while the other spiraled into the ground half a mile outside the perimeter. There was a flash of light followed by a muted boom.

  But victory typically comes at a price, as the bugs learned, when half a dozen quads and twice that number of T-2s hooked up with each other via the Legion’s ITC system to create an umbrella of computer-controlled antiaircraft fire. Both fighters were destroyed within a matter of seconds, and the skies remained clear after that.

  Santana shook his head sadly and went back to work. There was a lot to do, beginning with the creation of an evacuation list, and the need to get a hot meal into the bio bods. That’s what Santana and Zolkin were working on when Kelly appeared. Lupo had been incorporated into the landing zone’s defenses a quarter of a mile away, and the doctor had been forced to walk from there, which was why her combat boots were caked with mud. There weren’t any guards with her, nor were any required, given the nature of the situation. The naval officer came to attention and delivered a sloppy salute. Santana returned it. There was a continual roar as the ships came and went, forcing the cavalry officer to raise his voice. “Dr. Kelly. This is a surprise.”

  “I came to tell you that Private Knifeplay and the rest of your wounded soldiers are still alive,” Kelly said. “Or were when we loaded them onto one of the ships.”

  Santana remembered the lifeboat that had crashed immediately after takeoff and wondered if any of his legionnaires had been aboard it. “Thank you, Doctor. That was very thoughtful of you.”

  There was a moment of silence as the redhead looked down and back up again. Her eyes were very blue. “You’re welcome. Having spent time with Alpha Company, and not being assigned elsewhere, I was hoping you would let me stay.”

  Colonel Six and his men had been ordered to prepare a position for one of the heavy machine guns. When Santana looked in that direction, he saw Six looking back at him. It didn’t take a genius to figure out that the clone had seen Kelly arrive and was waiting to see what would happen.

  Santana’s first reaction was to say, “No,” but when he turned back, the expression on Kelly’s face was so hopeful he couldn’t bring himself to turn her down. “I’m afraid there will be one more battle to fight,” the legionnaire said soberly. “And we’ll need your skills.”

  A look of profound gratitude appeared in Kelly’s eyes as she said, “Thank you, sir,” and immediately made her way out toward the point where Six stood waiting. The two of them made an odd couple, or so it seemed to Santana, who knew the founder would have agreed with him.

  A sleek-looking yacht rumbled in from the east, and was forced to pause a few hundred feet south of Alpha Company’s position, as another ship rose out of the doughnut hole. The name Play Pretty was painted on the side of the ship’s hull. The boat’s elderly pilots had completed three trips by then—and were back for their fourth. The afternoon wore on.

  Night was a long black thing, punctuated by the roar of repellers, as the nearly nonstop flow of ships continued. Kobbi stopped by to visit Alpha Company around 0200. He was accompanied by an adjutant, and two bodyguards, all of whom joined Santana, Zolkin, and Dietrich around one of three fires. Colonel Six was off somewhere, with Kelly most likely, although Santana didn’t really care anymore. Not so long as they did their jobs.

  “There’s one helluva battle going on up in space,” the little general commented grimly, as a flask of whiskey made the rounds. He’d been talking for hours, and his voice was hoarse. “Our navy is back, and they’re doing everything they can to keep the bugs off our backs. So we owe the swabbies big-time.”

  All of the faces were lit from below as a breeze blew through and caused the fuel-fed fire to waver uncertainly. “But here’s the rub,” Kobbi continued gloomily. “Every time one of those ships lifts off, we get weaker, and the bugs get stronger! According to my scouts, the chits have us surrounded. I figure they will attack at dawn. So be ready to pull back at 0400. By that time, all the enlisted bio bods will be gone. That means it will be up to the remaining borgs and officers to beat the bugs back. Then, once we get some sort of respite, we’ll pull all of the brain boxes and fall back on the doughnut hole. The last ship will be large enough to accommodate everyone. It isn’t the way I was planning to leave—but I’m looking forward to a shower and a beer.” That got the predictable chuckle, and five minutes later, the general was gone. There were more people to brief, and the clock was ticking.

  The pullback went fairly smoothly, all things considered. And by the time a seemingly reluctant sun rose in the east, the allies were hunkered down inside a circle only half a mile across, which, though thinly populated, could still be defended thanks to the Legion’s battle-weary cyborgs. The quads were dug in at regular intervals all around the new perimeter, where their war forms would be abandoned when it came time to run. The T-2s, which were sprinkled in between the big behemoths, remained mobile and could shift positions if necessary. Farther out, forming a circle around the ring, were hundreds of crab mines.

  That was the scene as a sickly-looking daylight crept in across the land, and what looked like ectoplasm rose to hover spiritlike over the well-churned mud as Santana heard Dietrich say, “Holy shit. . . . Look at that!”

  The master sergeant wasn’t an officer, but had refused to leave, claiming that real officers wouldn’t know what to do without him. Six was there as well, as was Four-Four, and Dr. Kelly. T-2s, both armed and ready, were crouched to the left and right, with quads beyond. The scene that Dietrich wanted Santana to look at was hard to miss. During the hours of darkness thousands of Ramanthians had closed in on the LZ and stood ready to attack. They stood shoulder to shoulder, fifty deep, in a formation that had lined the far edge of the ditch.

  There was a sudden flurry of activity as more enemy soldiers came forward through lanes left for that purpose, pushed crudely made footbridges up until they stood on end, and allowed them to fall across the moat. That was the signal for flares to soar high into the air, for bugles to sound, and for noncoms to blow their whistles. Santana expected the soldiers to pour across the bridges at that point, and was surprised when they didn’t. As the defenders watched in horror, hundreds of clone civilians were forced to cross the ditch instead—men, women, and free-breeder children who had been captured during the early stages of the Ramanthian invasion and held in remote POW camps until now.

  Some of them tripped, a few fell into the moat, but most made it across. And that was when the mines went off. Boom! Boom! Boom! The overlapping explosions circled the LZ, sent columns of bloodied dirt up into the air, and cleared a path for the troops that poured in from behind. But some of the
civilians were still on their feet, still stumbling forward, as Colonel Six gave the necessary order. “They’re going to die no matter what you do! Fire!”

  Now it was the enemy’s turn to die, as the entire perimeter erupted in flame, and both the civilians and the bugs went down like wheat before a thresher. The outer edge of the new, smaller LZ looked like a ring of fire, as both the quads and the T-2s sent blue death stuttering out to slag the half-frozen ground. The officers were firing as well, machine guns for the most part, which sent red tracers out to probe the places where enemy soldiers might hide. And as each rank of Ramanthians fell, their bodies were added to the steadily growing circle of death that was defined by the ditch.

  That was the scene that Maylo Chien-Chu saw from the air, as the Xinglong circled the embattled landing zone, and fired on the Ramanthians. That support, when combined with the fire being put out by those on the ground, created the sort of respite that Kobbi had been counting on. “This is it!” the feisty little general shouted over the command channel. “Pull those brain boxes. . . . T-2s first. . . . And get them ready to load. The last ship is about to land.”

  That triggered a mad scramble to jerk each T-2’s box, and carry them two at a time to the edge of the so-called doughnut hole, where the Xinglong settled into a vapor cloud of her own making. The belly ramp was already in the process of deploying when the big skids touched down. Santana had Deker’s box in one hand, and Valario’s in the other, as he pounded up the ramp to the point where a very pretty woman stood waiting. The legionnaire was amazed to see that it was General Booly’s wife who was waiting to receive the boxes, but there was no opportunity to do anything more than nod as he turned to make another trip.

  Ten minutes later, all the T-2s were aboard, and it was time to bring the quad boxes in, as some of the officers fired heavy machine guns and the Ramanthians fired back. Santana ran to where Lupo was dug in, ordered the quad to disengage, and flipped a protective cover out of the way. With that accomplished, all he had to do was grab the T-shaped red handle and give it a full turn to the right. Then, still holding on to the same handle, the officer was able to pull the cyborg’s biological support module out into the open. Lupo tried to say “Thanks,” but no longer had the means to speak, and felt the world fade as sedatives were pumped into his disembodied brain.