by B. V. Larson
“Shut up,” Leeson told him. “Oceans are made of fish-piss, and every inch of soil on a farm came out of an animal at one time or another. You’re a frigging bio—you should know this.”
Carlos shut up.
“Okay, Kivi,” I said when we’d traveled for another hour. “Is it time?”
“Yeah, the buzzer will be going off any minute. I’ll hook-up.”
We gathered around and plugged our suits together. This allowed us to share power, data and also see the vid on Kivi’s tapper play on everyone’s screen.
The buzzer woke up and began to fly. It lifted off, headed for Legate and began broadcasting.
There was no reaction at first. But after a time, something came through. It was Graves’ face.
“This is an unauthorized signal,” he said. “Radio silence is paramount for all patrols.”
My squad whooped. We weren’t alone and trapped inside this rock.
While we watched his image and listened, Graves looked down—nodding and frowning. It had taken him a minute to realize we weren’t complete idiots, and we’d programmed the buzzer to send a short message a distance away from our location.
“McGill’s squad… I might have known. We’re still alive here, but it was a close thing. The initial attack was driven off, but our xeno people say they’ll gather a bigger force and hit us again within twenty hours.”
He looked down again for a moment. Then, he sighed. “If you want to press ahead, you can. If you want to return, you can do that too. We’re not getting any positive reports. We’re attacking a planet-sized enemy. With one legion, it’s like trying to kill a dinosaur with a pin. We’re only pissing it off. Godspeed, Graves out.”
“Damn!” Carlos said loudly. “That has to be the most beaten and piss-poor state of mind I’ve seen on old Graves. He knows we’re dead. He knows it.”
Leeson got up and kicked him. I wished Moller was here, but she’d died on the drop. She’d know how to get him to stay quiet.
Cooper came up to me next. “What’s the plan, Centurion?” he asked.
I looked at him, and he looked back at me.
“It’s pretty bleak,” I admitted. “I’ll put it to a vote: we keep marching to the mountain, or we go back to die with the rest of the legion at Legate.”
Everyone got out their thumbs. By tradition, as old as Rome itself, we all stuck out one thumb, either up or down depending on our desires.
Only I didn’t vote.
When the thumbs shifted, I was honestly surprised. About two-thirds voted to return.
I stood up and loomed over them. “Two things,” I said loudly. “I’m disappointed that so many of you are still cowardly after all these years. What’s a bad death to a Varus man? Nothing!”
“What’s the second thing, Centurion?” Cooper asked.
“This isn’t a democracy. Only one man here gets a vote. That’s me, your commander. Get up, we’re marching to that frigging mountain over there.”
“That’s what I figured…” Cooper said.
The man next to him handed over some cash. Cooper knew me pretty well, and he’d bet on the outcome.
Grumbling, they all got up and followed me. They were good men, but they needed a swift kick in the ass now and then to be reminded of it.
-52-
We didn’t make it all the way to the mountain. We tried, we really did, but they caught up to us somehow and sent a force we couldn’t deal with.
“Tanks, sir!” Cooper screamed.
I saw footprints sprinting down from a ridge. We’d stuck to the lowlands for hours, making ourselves less visible, walking in trenches and streams that were usually as dry as grave dust.
Looking back the way our trail of footprints led, I spotted the enemy soon enough.
Tanks. Big-ass tanks. These were possibly even larger vehicles than the ones we’d dealt with back on 51 Pegasi.
“Stop running!” I ordered. “We can’t outrun those tanks. They’re doing fifty kilometers an hour, easy. Take up positions on the ridge!”
The squad reversed direction and trotted up to the ridgeline. Once up there, they got a good look at what was coming our way.
“Dude…” Carlos said. “We’re dead. We are so, so, freaking dead. It’s not even funny.”
No one argued with him.
“Weaponeers,” I said, “choose your ground carefully. It’s all up to you. Shoot for the eyeballs that aim those turrets. When they get in range, give them a dose of rads that will blind anything inside about a five meter radius.”
It helped that I’d once been a weaponeer myself. I understood their weapons, and what they could do. Belchers weren’t easy weapons to handle, but they were very flexible in their application.
Cranking their apertures open, our two weaponeers did as I commanded. I felt a moment of pride to be commanding such troops. No one ran, no one threw down their weapon and started crying—they just prepped for battle like pros. It was good to see.
We were well and truly fucked this time, and we all knew it, but my squad was game anyway.
The sand splashed next to me on the ridge, but no one was there.
“Good to see you didn’t run off, Cooper.”
“I’ve got nowhere better to be, sir.”
The tanks were spreading out now. There were seven of them, and they were six meters tall each, by my HUD’s best guess.
“You think they see us?” Cooper asked.
“Yep.”
“It’s over then, right?”
“Looks that way.”
The rumble grew louder and louder. The treads were churning, kicking up looping spirals of dust behind each vehicle. Those eyeballs that guided the many turrets—I could see them now on extreme magnification. They never seemed to blink. I hadn’t noticed that before.
“It’s been good serving with you, McGill,” Cooper said. “And I’ve always wanted to apologize for what a dick I was back in the beginning.”
“You mean at the Mustering Hall?”
“That, and everything else.”
I laughed. “We’re more than even, kid,” I said. “Remember, I talked you into joining Varus.”
He was quiet for a second, then he spoke again. “That’s right… you did. Why am I apologizing to you?”
“Because you’re a dumb-ass. Now, get your head in the game. Start sniping on some eyeballs.”
Everyone with a snap-rifle was plinking away soon after that. We were still a kilometer out and shooting at moving targets the size of cantaloupes, but you could always get lucky.
A few of them pulped red, but not many.
At around 800 meters, the belchers began to sing. They smoked whole areas, blinding turrets on good hits.
That changed things. The enemy swerved, sending two tanks directly at us. The rest lined up behind them. We couldn’t hit the ones in the back.
We gave the front two hell, however. They didn’t have an organ left on their forward sloping armored region by the time they reached us.
“Why aren’t they firing back?” Cooper asked.
“Don’t ask, and keep shooting.”
When they got close, they ran right up the ridge and sent us scattering like rabbits.
“Overrun!” I shouted. “Get low, don’t fall under those treads!”
It was a useless order. Three of my men were crushed, including Carlos.
The rest of the tanks rolled up, encircling my team and aiming their guns down at us.
My men had pluck, I had to give them that. They keep shooting out eyeballs. Sure, we were about to be turned into spam, but we were dishing out a little pain first.
“…cease…” a voice said.
It was a loud voice. The voice of the Almighty himself.
But it wasn’t God, it was the tanks. They all spoke with one voice, at one time.
“…cease the damage…”
We looked at one another.
“What do we do, Centurion?” Leeson called to me.
&nb
sp; “Uh…”
Most of my men stopped rattling snap-rifles and screaming, but one of my weaponeers didn’t. He burned a cluster of eyeballs into curling black stalks.
A single cannon fired in response. It was so loud, so close, the dirt spanged off my armor. The weaponeer was gone. There was nothing left but a crater in the dirt.
“Ceasefire!” I shouted.
“They just want to eat us or something,” Leeson complained.
“Probably. Cease firing!”
When the shooting had stopped, we were left crouching, hugging dirt and staring up at machines that dwarfed us. The tanks were terrifying in every way. So alien, so powerful, so without pity or reaction to pain.
“What do you want?” I called out, cupping my hands. “You want to talk?”
“You must not damage me further. You are bad-stuff. You are a mistake.”
“Uh…” I said. “Am I talking to a Skay commander?”
The tanks were quiet for a bit, then they answered all at once again. “All Skay are commanders. All Skay rule their environments. You are disrupting my digestive processes without purpose.”
“Huh…” I said, chewing that over.
I lowered my rifle and looked at Leeson.
“Don’t ask me,” he said. “Romancing aliens is your job, McGill. Ask it if it’s male or female. Maybe if you get lucky, you can be the girl this time.”
Finding his suggestion unhelpful, I turned back to the grotesque monstrosities that encircled us.
“Take us to your leader,” I said, belting out the words. “Take us to the captain of this great ship. I have a gift for him.”
“Your words barely comport meaning. You are failed-things. You will stop your actions and comply.”
“Sounds like a typical Galactic asshole all right,” Leeson muttered.
That gave me an idea.
“Skay,” I said. “We are indeed irritants. We are powerful fighters, don’t you admit? We serve the Empire. We are enforcers for the Mogwa, but maybe we can serve you.”
“What the fuck?” Leeson said. “McGill…?”
I waved a hand for him to be quiet.
The tanks didn’t answer for a few moments.
“You are not good slaves if you would so willingly switch masters.”
“Not so!” I shouted. “We serve the Empire. If this province is legitimately owned by the Skay, then we serve the Skay. That’s not treachery. It is not even a choice.”
The tanks cogitated a bit more. I have to admit, I was feeling a trickle of sweat inside my suit. That often happened whenever I stepped over a new line of conduct I’d never even considered stepping over before.
My troops were looking at one another, gripping and regripping their rifles in confusion—but I didn’t care. This was do-or-die now.
“You have little to offer. You could not crack one Skay. There are thousands of us in the Core.”
“I’m sure that’s true, but wouldn’t it be nice not to have to come out here and patrol all the time? Look at the Mogwa, they had only a handful of ships stationed here. We are the true militia of Province 921, we garrison this province for them. We serve our owners with distinction, no matter who our rightful lords might be.”
Again, the Skay were silent. I wondered if they were slow-thinkers, or they were conversing among themselves, or if their translation device was imperfect.
During the pause, I had time to consider some of the things the Skay had said. You could not crack one Skay. That was confusing. Was Skay their name for their great ships?
The tanks began to move all of a sudden. They encircled us fully now, and they aimed their guns at us from every angle. Some of those turrets had no eyes left—lots of them didn’t—but they still aimed very well.
I realized then that they probably were networked. A few eyes in the group could be shared by all. We’d worked hard to blind them, but we’d been outclassed from the start.
“I have considered your words. You are not useless, but you would revert to supporting the Mogwa should they send a fleet here to retake this province. That makes you too unreliable to serve the powerful Skay.”
“Wait!” I shouted. “We have another gift, something much more valuable to give you!”
The tanks paused, and we sweated. I truly didn’t know if I was living through my last few seconds of life or not.
To die here, inside the belly of this Skay ship, that would surely mean a perming. No one would ever find me, or think to revive me. Hell, Humanity was likely to die soon after we did.
-53-
This time, the Skay gave it a long, long think before it replied to my offer of a gift. Leeson just about lost his mind during this period of waiting.
“McGill!” he hissed at me.
“Shut up.”
“Centurion, sir? Have you considered what it’s thinking of doing to us? Better to be blown up right now!”
I looked at him. He might be right, after all.
“It was stalking us right from the start,” he said. “Planning to harvest us to make new troops or something. Maybe your balls will end up serving as shock-absorbers inside one of these tanks!”
“Shut up,” I repeated, and he finally fell silent.
At last, the tanks spoke again.
“We are curious about your offer. This is an interesting behavioral test. Are you simple creatures of desperation and deceit—or possibly something more useful…?”
The Skay was talking faster and more clearly now. I realized it seemed to get better at speech every time it talked to me. Was it learning English that fast? If so, the AI was more than impressive. It wasn’t just smart, it was scary-smart.
“I assure you, Mr. Skay sir,” I said carefully, “that we humans are very useful. We’ve served under the Mogwa for a long time. We know secrets about your rivals.”
“Show me this secret instantly.”
“Uh… it’s not here, sir. It’s back at our ship.”
Another quiet ten seconds passed. Leeson looked like he was doing the potty-dance.
“We will move to that location. You must stop them from firing at my children. I have not yet calculated a way to subdue them without substantial loss. Perhaps you can help with that.”
“I sure will!”
The tanks backed away and turned. They began to rumble off in the direction of Legate. We trotted after them, but we were soon falling behind. One of the tanks returned to us to complain.
“Are you attempting to delay? To make your existence last as long as possible?”
“Uh… yes sir, but we’re not moving slowly on purpose, if that’s what you mean. Humans without technological vehicles don’t move very fast.”
“Disappointing. This experiment is now nine percent more likely to fail.”
“I’ve got an idea, why don’t you let us crawl on your backs, or into an ammo compartment? Then you can race at top speed.”
Another delay ensued.
“You’re sick, McGill,” Cooper complained. “I don’t want to climb into the guts of one of these things!”
I didn’t glance at him, but it was obvious Cooper was stealthed and standing nearby.
“You may not enter the bodies of my children,” the voice said at last. “You may, however, ride on their backs.”
The tanks sat there, motionless. Sucking in a breath, I knew I had to make the first move. I climbed up the armored side of the lead tank. In between its armor plates I could see hairy, leathery, lumpy places—but I didn’t shiver in horror.
Standing tall on the top of it, I called down to my troops, ordering them to do the same. There was a lot of grumbling and cursing, but we all managed to get up on the slanting armor and find a handhold.
“You’re a fucking genius, McGill,” Cooper whispered. “We’re going to ride these big retards right back to Legate, then we’ll tear them up, right? Color me impressed.”
I didn’t answer. I didn’t want to blow his cover, and I didn’t want the tank to doub
t me in case it was listening.
We rumbled away. The initial lurch sent one team member sprawling on the dusty ground. He was quickly run over by the next tank in the column.
Shrugging, I turned my attention forward again. This whole thing was a gamble. There was no sense crying over one soldier. Either my plan would work, or it wouldn’t. In the latter case we were all as good as dead any way.
“Hold on tighter,” I told the rest. They didn’t seem to need more encouragement. They were clamped on like kittens on a curtain.
The trip took maybe ten long minutes. At last, the tanks stopped.
“Legate is a few kilometers farther,” I said.
“They will fire on us if we get closer.”
“Why didn’t you just destroy our ship?” I asked.
“You question me? You are indeed a troublesome slave.”
“Ah,” I said, “I understand. You’re afraid. You feel pain. One tiny injury drives your kind away. Good to know.”
A turret and its associated cluster of eyeballs aimed at me. I wasn’t sure if it was checking me out or taking careful aim.
“There is no form of cowardice possible in the mind of a Skay. We calculate, and we proceed down optimal routes of logic.”
“Yep. That’s the kind of thing chickens say back home, too. Why’d you even come out here to Province 921 if you were afraid of an injury? Did you think you could kill us all without getting hurt?”
“Holy shit, McGill…” Cooper hissed beside me. “Cool it down!”
I ignored him.
The tank didn’t answer right off. At last, when it spoke, the answer surprised me.
“You are correct. I expected no injuries. Your weaponry was unexpectedly advanced. The Mogwa must be mad to arm frontier militia with teleport weapons.”
“They didn’t,” I told the Skay. “We figured them out ourselves.”
“That shifts the blame for this violation from them to you—but the guilt is shared, as you are under their dominance.”
“Listen,” I said, figuring it was time to change the topic. “I’ll communicate with my ship, but you’ve been jamming our radio transmissions. Turn that off, and we’ll communicate.”
“You will deceive us. You will use the signal to home in missiles on this location.”