by B. V. Larson
“Second-man,” I said, tapping a blue one on the side.
“I’m not second-man. He’s down there, at the end of the line.”
“Sorry. You all look alike to me.”
I walked down to the man at the end, and I saw the splotch of green over his eye. Then I recognized him for certain.
“Second-man, we’re going to issue some new weapons to your troops. They’re called snap-rifles.”
We didn’t have time for a formal training, but snap-rifles aren’t complicated. You slap in a box of needle-thin ammo, check the battery charge, then aim and spray fire at the enemy. The magazines held around a thousand rounds, but despite their small size, the projectiles did about the same amount of damage as an old-fashioned bullet.
The advantage of snap-rifles was mostly in the low weight-to-power ratio. You could hammer away at full auto, or with short bursts, all day long. The whole kit only weighed about five kilos, which allowed our light troops to move fast and hit hard.
As it turned out, this same kit was ideal for the Scuppers. Using only their spears, they had a real problem with range. Manning a wall effectively was almost impossible for them.
I was glad to see they took to the weapons readily and understood them without confusion. After all, they had a technological society. They’d built an amazing underground transport system.
Out in the forest, I heard an odd sound. A distant howl, maybe. Was that the wind? The skies were stormy, but the winds weren’t up to hurricane force—not yet. They were releasing a serious outpouring of rain though.
Suddenly, my Scuppers began firing their weapons. Confused, I thought for a sick second that they’d turned their weapons on us. Could I have brought them into our walls, only to have them play a Trojan horse trick?
“Enemy sighted!” Adjunct Barton shouted.
I had posted her up high, on the watchtower. Our lights were supposed to play sniper from the best vantage point we had, and they didn’t disappoint. They opened fire, joining the Scuppers.
Soon, a general storm of small arms rounds were heading downrange into the forest.
Wiping at my visor, I scanned for the enemy. I could see them now on my HUD. There were big red diamonds approaching in a ragged line. But I’d yet to see them with my own eyes.
A second later, one crashed into the open at the edge of the forest.
That’s when I realized why I’d been missing them. This enemy wasn’t a pod-walker. It was much smaller than that, only about two and a half meters high. Looking like a spider the size of a Clydesdale, the creature scuttled out and took a look around.
That didn’t last long. We raked him with fire. Sargon even got excited and turned him to ash with his 88.
“Hold with the artillery on single targets!” I shouted.
“Sorry, Centurion! I’ve been dying to kill something for days.”
“You’ll get your chance, Veteran.”
More spiders poked their way out of the ferns, but they were quickly driven back, leaving half their number behind thrashing in the mud.
“So far, so good,” Harris said beside me.
I glanced at him. “Easy as pie. But I bet you soiled your armor when the first one showed up, didn’t you?”
“Keep laughing,” he said. “There are a hell of a lot of mamma trees out there making monsters.”
He was right, so I didn’t tease him any further.
After the first stragglers were quickly blown away, the big wave came. This time, it wasn’t a bunch of puny spiders playing scout—it was the core of the enemy force.
What they did right this time was to come in all at once. Usually, we faced disorganized rushes broken up over time. Instead of that tried-and-true failure of a strategy, the Wur must have decided to gang up and hit us on every front at once with everything they had.
An avalanche of aliens charged out of the forest. There were a lot of pod-walkers on our scanners—hundreds of them. But even before the walkers arrived, thousands of smaller troops made their appearance.
Most of these were what we called acid-monsters. They were more sophisticated than the walkers, and we’d usually fought them in space. When I’d met my first Wur soldier, he’d been a space marine that burned his way into the hull of our transport with his sprays of concentrated acid.
The acid-monsters had brownish-gray claws with hard black nodules all over them. These arms were long and deadly in close. Unlike the pod-walkers, these troops seemed to have more brains, too.
To demonstrate their improved powers of thought, they’d come to this battle armed. They had launching devices that threw pods at us. These splashed on the puff-crete walls and began to smoke immediately. Anyone who was touched by the acid, or who breathed in the vapor, began coughing blood moments later.
Right behind what had to be two thousand acid-monsters were the walkers. Relative giants when compared to their smaller comrades, these guys halted when they came into view, and to our surprise, began scooping up and hurling the acid-monsters.
Our puff-crete wall was tough and about thirty meters tall. Nothing should have been able to penetrate it with traditional weaponry—but the Wur had never fought fairly. The acid-monsters balled-up and struck the walls with thudding reports.
Unfolding themselves like blooming flowers, they immediately crawled into our midst and began fighting in close quarters. Men, Scuppers and Wur were immediately locked into a wild melee.
“Sweep the 88s!” I roared, but Sargon and his boys were way ahead of me.
They beamed a steady gush of radiation into the forest, mowing down dozens of our attackers. Unfortunately, I hadn’t been clear enough with my instructions. They were burning the pod-walkers rather than the acid-monsters, or the occasional spider officer who skulked among them.
“No, shoot downward!” I shouted. “Kill the little guys at their feet!”
The big guns dipped, but they still slashed the pod-walkers for the most part. Once an 88 begins a sweep, the beam is hard to redirect. You have to finish the pass or it’s pretty much wasted. Then, after a cool-down cycle, you can sweep in a different pattern.
What these small artillery guns lacked in ease of use, they more than made up for in punch. As anti-personnel weapons, they were unparalleled in our arsenal. They simply destroyed anything smaller than an elephant instantly.
Unfortunately, these pod-walkers were bigger than elephants. When the radiation bath swept over them, their upper bodies exploded into flame, and their sensory organs were turned to ash at the first caress of the wide beams—but that didn’t stop them.
Instead, the pod-walkers went mad. Injured, smoking and blinded, they still staggered forward. Their massive feet plunged down, smashing smaller Wur to pulp.
Some of the big guys tripped and fell, thrashing. Others grabbed comrades and tore limbs from one another such was their fury and agony.
But at least half reached our walls.
Blind, driven mad by pain, they clawed and scrabbled at the puff-crete. Their groping hands caught fleeing men on the battlements, crushing them in their man-sized fists.
When they caught one of the Scuppers, the naked aliens stood no chance. Croaking in dismay, the natives were squeezed until they popped like wet bags of gore.
Barton’s light troops and my skinny-armed natives were shattered. Some were so desperate they jumped from the walls, falling to their deaths in the mud.
The 88s couldn’t strike the Wur at this sharp angle. First of all, because they would have hit our own men, and secondly, because they hadn’t been mounted to tilt down so sharply. It was an oversight, and my troops were paying for it with their blood.
Harris roared for his heavy troops to take to the walls then. I hadn’t even given the order, he knew what to do. Except for Graves, he was the most experienced man in the cohort.
“Force-blades!” he shouted. “Stay low, and carve them up when you get an opening.”
My single platoon of heavies rushed forward, and I joine
d them. Harris and I were up to our asses in aliens right off.
A huge arm like a telephone pole swept over my head. Harris and I ducked, but another man wasn’t so lucky. He was knocked off the wall, and he roared all the way down until he broke his back on the ground thirty meters below.
Lifting up our force-blades, we extended them to about a meter’s length and waited for the big arm to sweep blindly back. It did so a second later—and it was sliced clean off.
Harris and I hung on, but we were almost taken down with it. We spared a split second to grin at each other then moved to poke and stab at the Wur with our blades.
The alien was beyond pissed, howling and roaring, but it couldn’t do anything about its torment. It needed one arm to cling to the wall, and with the other gone, it had nothing left to use to crush us.
Finally, it gave up the ghost and toppled, flopping flat on its back among the many dead at the base of our walls.
Two or three minutes passed in a blur after that. Leeson’s weaponeers had switched to belchers, and they were blasting the Wur that still struggled on the battlements to fragments. Harris and I marshaled our surviving troops and marched as a knot, mopping up those that still struggled and clung stubbornly to life.
At last, the spiders called a retreat. The surviving Wur humped and scuttled back into the shelter of the trees that had spawned them.
Jubilant, Harris and I slammed our gauntlets together in a high-five.
Our celebration was short-lived, however. I was getting an urgent message on my tapper, my HUD… on every communication device I had on my person.
“McGill! Damn you!” Graves shouted. “Are you dead or just deaf?”
“Deaf, sir!” I shouted back, opening up the comm channel. “East gate is clear. Repeat, East gate held!”
“That’s great. Now, please get with the program. I’ve been requesting reinforcements for the reserves at the bunkers. Take every other man you’ve got, and send them to the center. Immediately!”
Blinking, I examined my HUD. During a pitched battle, I usually turned it off or at least toned it down. It could be very distracting when you were fighting for your life in hand-to-hand combat.
Now that I took in the bigger picture, I felt a sinking feeling.
We’d held on our front—but two other zones of the fort walls had been breached. We were being overrun. Soon, the enemy would reach the bunkers in the center of our camp.
Flipping up my visor, I turned my face upward into the pouring rain. A gush of water, bitter winds, and fresh air immediately swept through my sweaty suit.
Then I slapped my helmet closed again, and I began giving unwelcome orders to my weary men.
-40-
Legionnaires like myself are men of the stars. We’d long ago traded in a normal existence to fight and die over and over on hostile planets that are so far from Earth you can’t even spot our home system in their night sky without a telescope.
It’s only natural that, in such a state of isolation, we had developed elements of our own culture. One such item was an often quoted proverb.
Don’t trade a good death for a bad one.
Only the oldest salts, the most experienced and hard-bitten soldiers would speak those morbid words. For a long time, my own comprehension of that nugget of wisdom had eluded me.
The idea that sometimes dying was for the best went against every natural instinct a young man has.
But today, I understood the proverb. Today, it was obvious even to me that those who had fallen fast and clean in the first hour of the battle had been the lucky ones. My envy for them grew as the day dragged on and transformed suddenly into night, which was normal on the fast-rotating planet we called Storm World.
By that time, banged-up and weary, I figured it would be a fine blessing to be all queued up, waiting in limbo. As it was, I could only dream of fresh lungs and clean air to breathe. Mine had long since been tainted by acid, blood and bile.
A peaceful rest was denied me, however. Instead, my unit had fought to the point of exhaustion. At our sides were the last two hundred-odd native warriors, and I’d come to appreciate their grit.
By the time night fell, we were huddled inside Gold Bunker, and we were nearly as crazy as the Wur themselves.
“They’ll get in here,” Harris said, his big eyes rolling around as he stared at the ceiling.
Outside, the walkers thudded around and scratched at our puff-crete bunker. They tried to pry open the steel doors now and then, making us all tense up, but so far they hadn’t made the all-out effort that was required to tear their way inside.
“They’ll get in here eventually,” Harris continued. “It’ll happen when the spiders come into the compound. They’ll tell these morons they have to work together to pry our doors open. Then—that’ll be it for us.”
“Shut up, Harris,” I rasped.
Even those few words caused me to go into a coughing spasm. I’d caught a lungful of acidic vapors a half-hour back, and it was still bothering me. Every now and then, I day-dreamed about making a run for Blue Bunker to get medical help, but that was just a fantasy. Even if I made it, I doubted our bio people would squirt any regrowth fluids into my lungs. They’d probably just decide to recycle me out of hand after a brief exam.
“First-man,” my Scupper lieutenant said to me.
He’d been trying to get my attention for the last several minutes, but I hadn’t felt like going through the ordeal it would take to communicate with him.
“First-man,” he repeated.
Turning my burning head toward him at last, I regarded him with my one good eye. My right eye wasn’t working anymore. After I’d taken a blast of acid in my faceplate, even ripping off my helmet hadn’t completely solved the problem. Some of the caustic fluid had splashed onto my hair and skin. I probably looked like burnt hamburger.
My lieutenant didn’t care about my looks, however. He didn’t seem to have noticed my injuries at all.
“First-man,” he repeated.
“What the hell is it? Talk!”
“Thank you. I don’t wish to seem rude, sir, but it might be a good time to retreat.”
I stared at him tiredly for a moment before I managed to bubble up a laugh. That turned into a cough, which subsided a few long seconds later.
“We can’t retreat. The lifters that took about half the legion back up into space are all gone now—they can’t land safely.”
“That was the biggest cow-pie of all,” Harris complained. “When I saw those ships coming down, I thought we were saved. But what Turov really wanted was to save our equipment. She took almost all the revival machines—did you know that, McGill?”
“Yeah,” I rasped.
A loud noise interrupted our talk at that point.
Bam-Bam-Bam-Bam!
One of the pod-walkers was hammering on the doors again. The doors shivered, and mud squelched out of the cracks around the battered hinges—but it held. The abused doors weren’t giving up, not yet.
Everyone grabbed up their weapons and aimed them at the entrance. We breathed with our mouths open, as if the monster might hear us otherwise. Who knew? Maybe it could.
My team had been charged by Turov herself to die on these steps if necessary to keep the Wur out.
After a long moment of quiet, we heard the thumping of massive feet. The walker had given up and moved off, looking for another way in—even though it should have been obvious by now there wasn’t one.
“One more lifter would have done the trick…” Harris lamented. “I heard Turov tried to bring one more down to Gold Bunker. She was going to save her pretty ass and hopefully some of us with it. But the pilots refused to land after they saw the base was overrun.”
“First-man we must retreat,” my lieutenant began again.
I whirled around and grabbed his skinny arm. It felt rubbery, almost like there wasn’t a bone inside at all. I reminded myself not to squeeze, and I let go of him.
“Second-man,” I s
aid. “There is no way out of here. We’re trapped. Don’t you get that?”
He stared at me with an unreadable alien expression. “Would it be bad manners to refute your statement, First-man?”
“Uh…” I said, turning over what he’d said in my mind. I shook my head and smiled with the good half of my mouth. “No,” I said. “Go ahead and argue with me. I don’t care anymore.”
“Then, know this: The tubes are below us. There is an access point.”
For the first time in an hour, a tingle of hope stirred in my mind. I turned to him slowly.
“There’s a tube? A tunnel? A way to get down into your subway system?”
He took a second to understand the translation, then he spoke again. “Yes. That is what I said.”
I whooped then. It was a startling Georgia battle-cry of the kind usually only heard in a bar, long after midnight.
A dozen dirty heads turned toward me. Two dozen eyes stared.
“What now, McGill?” Harris asked. “You got a crazy idea?”
“I do at that, Adjunct. Everyone, gather your kit. We’re following this blue gentleman, here.”
“Um… Didn’t the tribune tell us to guard this spot with our lives, sir?”
“She did indeed, Harris. But I’m going to give her—and you—something she’ll appreciate much more than pointless sacrifice.”
Harris followed me, and I followed Second-man. A handful of confused troops crept after us.
The Scupper led us down deep into the bowels of the bunker. Like most, it had two levels, then a basement underneath that for storage.
There was an armory down here, but the cage doors stood busted open, the guards long since summoned away to man the walls.
Past that, generators thrummed releasing a steady trickle of fusion power. At least we still had lights and heat.
The last room was a storeroom, and second-man led us there. At a bare spot on the puff-crete floor, he gestured with his odd, sucker-tipped finger.
“This is the spot, as closely as I can measure.”
“Um… there’s nothing here. Where’s the entrance?”
“When the humans arrived, they covered it over with this hard substance. It was foolish of them, in retrospect.”