by Hal Colebatch, Jessica Q Fox, Jane Lindskold, Charles E Gannon, Alex Hernandez, David Bartell
“Hi. They’ll be here soon. Not more than ten minutes, possibly as little as five.”
“How many losses did we take?”
“Once they started coming on strong, we couldn’t keep our heavy weapons positions secure or our lines dressed. We lost about two dozen in the last hour, and the last line will be coming under fire any minute.”
A set of rapid explosions told them that even that estimate had been optimistic. Somewhere overhead, there was a rapid, shuddering rush that echoed strangely in the saturated air of the valley: loud but muted, like listening to a sound system with all the treble removed. Explosions—large ones, starting five hundred meters behind the pillbox—pounded their way further east.
“That’s not good,” Hilda observed.
“Yeah, but that’s probably as close as their air units are going to come for now,” Smith speculated. “They know that the detection and tracking systems on the missiles we captured can’t see up through the clouds here, but that we can prang them if they drop down beneath the murk.”
And murk was not an exaggeration: the pillbox, built and dug out of an upthrust bulge of rock, was flanked by perpetually bubbling hot springs. A constant upward drift of water vapor created a ceiling haze that was nearly opaque at fifty meters altitude, and largely trapped in place by the prevailing temperature gradients about three hundred meters above that. Real fleet sensors—downlook densitometers and the like—could have picked out the basic terrain features well enough to generate targeting solutions, but to the rear-echelon, battalion-level gear that the kzinti had been using in the Susser Tal, the murk was functionally impenetrable.
“Do you think they’ll eventually bring their attack craft down into the valley?”
Smith nodded. “When they see the last of us run into the pillbox and shut the door, they’ll want to bring down the fire. I would.”
Hilda looked up the gentle upward slopes to north and south; both highlands pinched somewhat tighter here, putting the pillbox astride the valley’s narrowest bottleneck. “And the ’Runner marksmen that you’ve sent up to the defilade slit-trenches; how are they going to get inside in time?”
“They’re not.”
“What? They’ll be slaughtered out here.”
“No, they won’t, because they’re going to stay in hiding. Until they get their signal to fire.”
“But when the kzinti fan out and check their flanks, they’ll find them.”
“Tell me, Hilda, how well have the kzinti been following their standard tactical doctrines today?”
“Well, they—” She looked at him, wondering. “In a word, they weren’t following any doctrine at all. They were coming straight at us.”
Smith nodded. “So trust me for just a little longer; I’m pretty sure our troops up on the slopes are going to be fine.”
Deep within the tree line, a ripple of heavy reports—’Runner elephant guns—was drowned out by several stuttering roars and a supercharged whine-hiss: kzin automatic weapons and a heavy beamer, respectively.
Hilda swallowed. “They’re coming. And our troops won’t get here much sooner than they do.”
Smith touched her cheek with a grimy, sulfur-reeking hand. “I know. So, get inside the pillbox.”
“What? I’m an officer; I’ve got to stay out here and help—”
“It’s because you’re an officer that you’re needed inside the pillbox; it’s the most crucial position.”
“Why?”
“Because without radios, we need someone with excellent judgment inside.”
“Excellent judgment about what?”
“About when the kzinti are going to bring down the tacair hammer and blow the whole upper level to dust. If we don’t have someone in there who’s shrewd enough to anticipate that airstrike at least half a minute before they make it, we’ll lose all our combatants. Hell, we’ll lose anyone who isn’t already underground in the bomb shelter. So. Get inside the pillbox. Now.”
The humans ran like so many startled veerthsas, one of the prey animals that the kzinti brought to every world they settled. Small and fast, the veerthsa was quite challenging to bring down, but, ah, the satisfaction when the spindly beast was finally pinned beneath an irresistible paw…
So it felt now, watching the humans scatter away from their prepared positions, their tattered clothes streaming behind them like the shredded flags of a lost battle. Each defensive line had crumbled faster than the one before it, his Heroes gathering inertia and more bloodlust with each successive triumph. The evasive human foes had finally stood and fought: they had been forced to, Freay’ysh-Administrator told himself, since they were trapped in a valley with no exit. A small voice, that belonging to the weakling trait that Chuut-Riit bombastically liked to call “higher reason,” whispered that today’s success was also puzzling: the kzinti had tried this tactic before, led by the very capable Zhveeaor-Captain. But those offensives had bogged down every time, gaining only three kilometers a day. The double-envelopments, the L-ambushes, the stay-behind attack teams, the cunning use of mines to guide kzin assault forces into cleared fields of fire: the humans had not made such extensive, or effective, use of these ploys today.
But the voice of Freay’ysh-Administrator’s rage and bloodlust shouted down these observations into mute oblivion: why question what was working? The answer could be as simple as this: he, Freay’ysh-Administrator, was a more inspiring leader than Zhveeaor-Captain. Also, he had been willing to sacrifice more kzinti in a sustained assault in order to achieve his objective. Two hundred eighty kzinti had started the offensive this day, and slightly more than a third were either dead or incapacitated. Many of those still on the line were severely wounded; he had personally seen three Heroes amputate and cauterize their own ruined arms with beamers and move forward, carrying whatever weapon they could still wield. It was a day of loss and blood and terror and fierce fierce fierce exultation: it was akin to living in the time of the Ancient Heroes, of being in one of the sagas, of…
“Freay’ysh-Administrator, our scouts have come upon a hard point: a large pillbox partially built out of an immense tooth of stone straddling hot springs.”
Freay’ysh-Administrator looked around for the source of the voice; a Hero, his left side bloody and partly shredded by a human mine, waited upon his reply. Freay’ysh-Administrator wanted to shriek in joy and rage, and order a general charge—but the small, interior voice reasserted momentarily, just long enough to compel him to ask: “This pillbox is in a clearing, yes?”
“Yes, Freay’ysh-Administrator.”
“How much open ground from the edge of the surrounding cover to the pillbox?”
“Rangefinders put it at eighty meters, Freay’ysh-Administrator.”
Eighty meters: not much, but on the other hand, the humans had achieved quite a lot, just clearing that much brush and building this pillbox. Whatever their disgusting habits and contemptible inferiorities, the leaf-eaters did not lack industriousness. Or inventiveness: somewhere off in the distance, a whistle shrilled three times. A signal of some sort, obviously, but for what? The Ancestors themselves would not have known. “Is the fort equipped with heavy weapons?”
“Impossible to tell until we probe it. So far, all we have seen is that they have adapted some of our own beamers to personal use. And we know that some of our missiles are missing, and probably in their hands.”
“Yes, that is true. Do you have a clear signal to Captain?”
The Hero blinked at hearing his superior’s title stripped of his Name. “We have a clear signal.”
“He is to call in our two dedicated attack craft immediately. They are to fly to these coordinates and await our signal to come beneath the mists and strike at the pillbox, if necessary. Choose three steady Heroes for laser designation.”
“And then, Freay’ysh-Administrator?”
Freay’ysh-Administrator heard the eagerness in the kzin’s voice, felt his own hunger for rending the humans limb from limb leap up to me
et that excitement—but mastered it. For the last time, he promised the best, fiercest, and truest part of himself. After this, the Rage. Just the Rage. Until the humans are no more.
“Freay’ysh-Administrator?”
Freay’ysh-Administrator struggled back out of his visions, out of savoring the carnage to come. “Security teams to the flanks. Assure we are safe. The rest encircle the hardpoint. Concentrate fire. If the humans are weak enough, we shall not risk the attack craft. If they are stubborn, one airstrike will ensure that their fort becomes their tomb.”
Through old-fashioned binoculars, Smith watched the five kzinti trudge up the hill. Like almost everything else the ’Runners used, the binoculars did not rely upon batteries. And in this brief campaign, that had been a welcome feature: there had been enough other logistical needs to contend with.
One of the ’Runners in the defilading trench whispered, “Captain, I see ’em, too. Should we—?”
“Stay down. Stay quiet. Stay calm. Those are orders.”
A stunned silence was followed by a whispered chorus of “Yes, sir.”
Smith watched the five ratcats scan the slopes, saw two glance longingly behind, in the direction of the firefight and the fleeing humans. The intervals between the Heroes of this flank security patrol had started well, but now they were pulling apart: the two back-lookers had begun to drift wide of the other three. Predictably, back down toward the battle unfolding on floor of the valley.
Remonstrations that Smith could not hear were obviously uttered. And ignored. The kzin on point in the upslope group raised a weapon, pointed in the direction of the two malcontents. One roared something: the posture could have meant outrage, challenge, frustration, impatience, or any mix of them. The point-man’s gun wavered. The other two did not move directly away, but their distance widened. Within a minute they would be out of sight of the three who were still ascending the slope, and it was plain to Smith that the pair’s course would then shift even more radically back in the direction of the valley floor and all the excitement there.
Which, twenty seconds later, became an almost irresistible lure. The main kzin force, having gathered in a wide ring around the pillbox, tried to send a team to work through the misty margin between the flank of the strongpoint and the southern hot spring. Weapon fire erupted from the pillbox; two kzinti went down immediately. A third was clipped in the back of the leg as he tried to reach the safety of the tree line again. Stumbling to a knee, he rose up, was swatted down again by a shot from a hunting rifle, staggered, got both legs under him—and his back fairly exploded in a cloud of small bits of blood and fur: the work of a strakkaker on full auto. The mauled kzin finally fell over. In the meantime, the final, fourth member of the kzin probing team leaped into the underbrush and vanished.
The response along the kzin line was both spontaneous and unanimous: the surrounding perimeter of covering brush erupted in weapon fire, all directed inward upon the pillbox. Beamers slashed at it, autoguns peppered it with the force of jackhammers. When that first wave of fire relented, and the smoke cleared, the pillbox still stood. It certainly looked worse for wear, but it was structurally intact and defensibly sound.
Smith swung his binoculars back to the kzin flankers coming up his slope. The two who had already been veering away were now sprinting pell-mell back in the direction of the battle that had been joined. Of the remaining three, their pace slowed, not due to argument, but to indulge in a wistful appreciation of the same martial spectacle. One of them started pointing in that direction as the gunfire began again: not so concentrated this time, but steady and loud.
Which was why none of the three slope-scouting kzinti heard the reports of the elephant guns that fired into them from the rear. Two of the Heroes went down immediately, one missing his head before he even started to fall. The third staggered against a tree, then fell into the brush, left arm dangling uselessly, his right leg washed in blood: not quite an arterial wound, but a bad one.
His tumble into the bushes was probably what saved him in those first seconds. There was no movement in the undergrowth for a five count, then a ten count—
At the count of thirteen, the kzin came rushing out with a severe limp, but the real shock was that he could force himself to move at all. Smith saw one flash and then another jump out of the dark wall of the undergrowth some seventy meters behind the kzin. Both shots were misses. Another ten meters, and the kzin would reach the cover of a granite outcropping and be within shouting distance of—
Two more flashes licked out of the distant wall of tangled vegetation, and the last kzin fell over, three meters short of the outcropping.
Smith exhaled through a smile.
The fellow next to him in the slit trench—a ’Runner named Tip and their best guncotton brewer—cocked a quizzical head: “What’s up, hauptman?”
“Our odds of success,” Smith replied, “our odds of success.”
Freay’ysh-Administrator waved away the two scouts who had just returned from scouting the left, or northern, flank. They claimed there had been nothing to report on the northern slopes. So why were the other three in their team continuing to search? Nervous glances had gone back and forth between the two of them: because they were going higher, just to be sure. Yes, that was what they were doing.
In his earlier and weaker days, Freay’ysh-Administrator would probably have clouted them across the nose for what was obviously an abandonment of their assigned duties: there was no way they could have gone high enough up the slopes to conduct a full security sweep. That, no doubt, was what the other three, including the team leader, were still doing.
But Freay’ysh-Administrator could not bring himself to punish them for heeding the savage summons singing in their blood, since it was the same one he was following as well. Indeed, the scouts on the other flank had abandoned their mission en masse as soon as the barrage was unleashed upon the pillbox. When asked to explain themselves, they had looked down, abashed—a cub’s reflex—and admitted that they had forgotten the mission they had been sent to carry out.
In the moment, Freay’ysh-Administrator had had to struggle to keep his pelt from writhing in sudden amusement, because he knew they were telling the truth. When the siren-song of combat drew them back, it wasn’t an act of insubordination. It was a strangely intense, almost irresistible attraction to a veritable orgy of violence, of sating a bloodlust almost as arousing as the promise of ch’rowl. The need to weed out insurgents, to show mastery, to exact vengeance had long fallen aside as the primary motivations of their struggle in the Susser Tal: it was to satisfy their hunger—both individually and as a group—to drench themselves in the gore of the humans. Nothing else would do, for nothing else remained in their minds.
The kzin known as Communicator approached him. “Latest reports, Freay’ysh-Administrator.”
“Yes?”
“Still no word from the last upslope scouts, sir, although it is still somewhat early to expect them to have—”
“I am unconcerned: if the humans had significant forces up there, they would have intervened by now. They would have a clear field of fire down upon us here, and would not be so foolish to miss taking advantage of it.”
“As you say, Freay’ysh-Administrator. Our attempts to outflank the stronghold itself have been repulsed. There are only a few meters between the flanking faces of the pillbox and the hot springs to either side. And there is no cover.”
Freay’ysh-Administrator waved his acceptance of the situation: he had watched three of the attempts himself. They had been futile—and costly—tactical probes. “What else?”
“We confirm at least half a dozen defenders killed inside the pillbox, but there must be at least fifty more leaf-eaters sheltering behind its walls.”
“Have you tried to fire through the embrasures with the beamers?” It would be a difficult shot, of course, but the effects, if successful—
As if to illustrate the futility of that option, a beam lanced out at the pill
box. It was focused on the horizontal slit in the front face of the structure, but then it seemed to double back on itself. The resulting explosion threw out a jet of dust and debris, occluding the embrasure, and making it impossible to keep the beam fixed on the initial aim point. At the same instant, one of the defenders’ elephant guns barked, and the kzin who had been wielding the beamer yowled piteously.
“That has been the result so far,” explained Communicator. “Although we cannot see it in the shadows, the embrasure is stepped, and irregularly so. Consequently, if the beam is not perfectly aligned, it will graze against the stepped surfaces. This deflects part of the beam’s energy back upon the beam itself and obscures the aim point with debris. Also, to hold the beam on target for more than two seconds both threatens to burn out the weapon from overheating, and also attracts the attention of the enemy’s marksmen, as you just saw.”
So. Half a dozen of the humans killed. Maybe. At least thirty of his Heroes had been lost in the trade; more, if you counted the wounded. Working around to the rear of the structure would mean an all-night hike up the slopes and down again on the far side. And once there, if his guess was correct, they would find rear-facing embrasures in the structure, built to frustrate just such an attempt to get in behind it. He turned his gaze on Communicator. “The attack craft are on station?”