Steel World

by Larson, B. V.

  When they did get the order to fire on us, we were shocked by their powerful weaponry. Each saurian guard had a long tube which rode on his shoulder. I didn’t recognize the weapon type, but I knew it wasn’t going to be snap-rifles versus teeth this time.

  Violet gouts of energy leapt off the walls, quickly burning down the men who’d made it inside. There were at least thirty heavily-armed and armored guards up there now, and more were showing up all the time. They directed their beams down onto the tarmac like men with fire hoses, nailing those of us who were locked outside the compound. The beams incinerated whatever they touched. Men fell burning like a field of dry grass.

  I felt glad as I watched that we weren’t the first to reach those walls. As there was no way through, our orders changed.

  “That’s it!” screamed Harris into our headsets. “Break ranks, squad, follow me!”

  He veered to the right, and we followed him in a knot.

  “Spread out! Spread out! Run for that truck!”

  We were running all out now. The only cover nearby was a refueling truck. We’d almost reached it when another squad beat us to it. They huddled close, and began peppering the enemy on the walls with their snap-rifles.

  We slowed down and Harris lifted his arm, directing us toward another, more distant scrap of cover. This time it was a communications tower of some kind.

  We never heard his order to move on, however. Suddenly, the refueling truck a group of our troops were hugging up to was taken out. It flared cherry-red—then transformed into a white explosion.

  My entire squad was thrown off their feet. Some of us had burning uniforms. The squad that had been taking cover behind the truck had vanished. There were only a few smoking boots and broken bits of gear left.

  “Head for the tower,” Harris said. “From there, we’ll spread out and charge the wall.”

  It was insane, but we had no other choice. There were landing pits for ships here and there, but nothing that wasn’t over a mile off. The walls of the terminal building were closer than that.

  From all around us, groups of troops began firing. They were exposed, but we outnumbered the enemy fifty to one. Things changed when some of our weaponeers got their big projectors set up and raked the top of the wall. The enemy was forced to duck, and I saw some of them get knocked right off their perches.

  I’d had some hopes that the early assaulters would win through and take the wall for us, saving those of us still out in the open. But despite their surprise tactics, they were burned away, swept right off the puff-crete stairways by the heavy energy weapons. Unarmored, light troops couldn’t take any kind of hit from such powerful guns.

  “I hit one with my rifle,” Carlos complained. “I swear I did. No penetration, zero.”

  “How the hell are we going to get up those walls?” Kivi asked. There was a touch of panic in her voice.

  Veteran Harris didn’t answer right away. We’d reached the tower, and were hiding behind it. They couldn’t take this structure down as easily as a truck full of fuel—it was a solid building.

  That didn’t stop them from trying. As soon as they noticed we were hiding back there and taking potshots from cover, they swept the base of the tower with their energy weapons.

  Only one of us got hit. Kivi was too slow to pull back—either that, or she never saw it coming. She was there one second, screwing on her scope and barrel-extension to turn her snap-rifle into a sniper’s weapon, and the next—she was gone. There wasn’t much left. At least it was quick.

  “Damn,” I whispered.

  Harris came to me and banged his hand on my shoulder. “McGill, I need a volunteer.”

  I nodded. It was my fate to be the perpetual volunteer.

  Harris seemed to divine my thoughts. “This isn’t bullshit to get you killed. We have to get into this battle. We’re pinned down and taking heavy losses.”

  I nodded again. He pointed to a small car sitting behind the tower. I stared at it, hoping he wasn’t serious.

  “Take that thing to the wall.”

  “Sir, I could run faster.”

  His big hand lifted from my shoulder and slammed the back of my helmet.

  “Maybe,” he said, “but you can’t fly.”

  I looked at the unit again, and I understood. It was an air car. The smallest, sorriest, golf-cart-looking air car I’d ever seen.

  “Take a man with you to fly shotgun,” he said.

  I looked at Carlos, and I grinned.

  “Just because I woke you up on the transport?” he demanded.

  “No, because you snapped my ass with a towel while I was puking.”

  “Oh yeah, that.”

  We climbed in and had it working twenty seconds later. Air cars were part of the tech the Galactics handed out to every world. They weren’t special enough to warrant shipping from one planet to the next, but they were cool.

  Fortunately, the controls were virtually identical on worlds with humanoid populations. Saurians were a stretch, but they did have the same number of limbs and were about the same dimensions. The tail-holes in the seats made you feel like you were going to slide out backward into the air and fall, however.

  I poured on the vertical lift, and we sailed higher and higher. I suspected at that moment that the saurians had refused to pay for air power in the contract so we couldn’t do things exactly like this. They’d wanted us to stay trapped on the ground with them, stacking the deck in any way they could.

  When we passed over the tower, I veered off and flew at an angle. I already had a plan. From my vantage point in the air, I saw another lifter had landed and I was going to park behind it and hide, looking for a moment to charge in and land in the compound. If we could get behind the saurians, they would have to worry about us. They’d have a much harder time killing all our attacking troops on the tarmac.

  The second lifter, I realized after a moment’s surprise, was one of ours. As I watched, troops gushed out of it. I was disappointed to see it was another cohort of lightly-armed recruits.

  These guys never had a chance. The saurians weren’t about to be taken by surprise from another flank again. They unloaded on them the moment they ran down the ramp.

  A hundred died in the first minute. They never even knew what hit them. The survivors were in shock, rolling under the ramp itself, trying to climb back up onto the ship—the saurians were giving them hell.

  They made sure not to damage the ship itself, of course. There were rules to this game of war. We could kill saurians and destroy their equipment. They could do the same to us. But any neutral aliens—or especially Galactics, as I’d found out—were strictly off limits. Corvus and all her lifters were owned by the Skrull. Unless they attacked directly, they were non-combatants.

  “Fly around to the other side—fly low and fast,” Carlos shouted.

  I didn’t have any good ideas at the moment, and I was sickened by the waste of good troops coming off the second lifter. Against my better judgment, I did as he suggested. We dove around behind the lifter and skimmed low. We dashed in a spiraling circle after that, moving around the walls of the terminal.

  “They’re all focusing on the second lifter, trying to kill every troop that comes down the ramp. While they’re occupied, we’ll swoop in from the other side.”

  It was worth a try, so I did it. The move almost worked, to Carlos’ credit. We were within about two hundred meters of the wall and zooming toward it when the enemy finally noticed us—or at least one of them did.

  He must have been posted on the far side of the complex by someone with a brain. Instead of joining the feeding-frenzy of his comrades on the side of the wall where all the action was, he stood his post on our side, looking bored.

  Even so, he had his head cranked around to watch the interesting stuff going on behind him. When he finally spotted us it was almost too late.

  He raised his heavy tube and directed it toward our tiny craft. One of us began screeching in fear—I’m pretty sure it w
as Carlos.

  I pulled back on the steering controls, which was essentially a tube of metal with a v-shaped head on it. My action caused the craft to buck upward, and we rose rapidly into the air.

  The dino’s first shot burned the air under us. We saw the blinding glare of colored plasma, like a flame-thrower, gush past below. Not satisfied with a miss, he levered it upward to track us. I thought I knew how a bug felt when a spray of deadly gas came out of a gardener’s can.

  I heaved to the right, away from the plasma. This threw us into a corkscrew spin. We went over the walls and crashed on a roof inside the compound.

  Carlos rolled out on top of me. I thought my leg was broken for a few seconds, but I forced it to work and the pain subsided. I rolled Carlos off me and got out my weapon. I expected at any instant the saurian that had spotted us was going to burn us both to ash.

  The next gush of energy roared over our heads, however. I realized that the roof we were on was higher than the wall that ringed the compound. He couldn’t hit us from his position. We were safe for the moment.

  I groaned and struggled to get back into the game.

  “My ribs are broken,” Carlos said, wheezing.

  “Get up anyway.”

  On our hands and knees, we crept to the edge of the roof.

  I couldn’t believe it—but we’d made it inside the compound.

  -19-

  The first thing we did was try to find a way down into the building. I figured if we could get inside, we’d be safe, because the building was full of Nairb. As non-combatant aliens, no one was allowed to fight in their presence and risk injuring them—that was against Galactic Law.

  Unfortunately, we ran into a problem immediately: there was no way into the building from the roof.

  “Any human would have put at least a hatch on this roof!” complained Carlos.

  I had to agree with him. I’d had more than my fill of cultural differences for the day.

  “We have to find a way down or we’ll be pinned up here, and they’ll come kill us eventually.”

  In the end, it took some risky behavior to find the way down. Instead of ladders, or internal stairways, the saurians had built an external set of steep stairs that went down one side of the structure. The stairs were exposed and there wasn’t even a guardrail.

  Carlos and I looked at one another. I knew what we were both thinking: did we run down those stairs, risking annihilation, or did we lay on the rooftop and hope our side won the battle?

  “I guess we have to do what we can sniping from up here,” Carlos said.

  I shook my head. “Sniping isn’t enough. We can’t get through their armor without focused fire.”

  “What do you suggest?” he asked suspiciously.

  “People are dying down there.”

  “Yeah? And we’re probably going to die up here, too.”

  “We have to go for it,” I told him.

  I got up and set myself like a runner prepping for a sprint. My side hurt, my head hurt and even my eyes seemed to ache in my skull.

  Groaning, Carlos heaved himself into a crouch at my side.

  “This is crazy, we don’t even know if there is a way in at the bottom of the stairs. I mean, don’t you think they probably locked all the doors by now?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, “but I’m not sunbathing up here while these lizards kill two cohorts of light troops.”

  “Why not?”

  That was the last thing either of us said. Our conversation was interrupted by a singing sound. We didn’t even have time to throw ourselves flat.

  An energy-charged mortar shell came down on the top of the building. Some of the weaponeers supporting our light troops must have gotten into position.

  The building shook under us.

  “They’re crazy!” shouted Carlos. “If they kill one of the Nairbs, we’ll all be in trouble.”

  Another singing sound came, and the building shook again.

  “Look!” Carlos said, pointing across the expanse of the roof.

  We saw the shell had punched a burning hole through the roof. Without another word, we got up and ran to it, jumping blindly into the black, smoking hole. Anything was better than waiting around on the roof or charging down the exposed stairway.

  We came down on a dusty floor lined with offices. It appeared to be deserted. There were pod-like desks and seats that looked like blobs of paint. I landed on one of these and my boots punctured it. I learned that the formless blob was indeed full of colored liquid. I guess that was a comfortable seat for a Nairb.

  The important thing was, we didn’t see any enemies. We looked, but there weren’t any stairways on this level either.

  “Are we going outside to run down, or are we going to dig through the floor?” Carlos asked me.

  “There has to be something,” I said.

  I found it pretty fast. A trap door that led down to the next level. We dropped through, and found another trap door. Carlos followed me, complaining every step of the way.

  When we reached the bottom floor, we found the bureaucrats who’d abandoned their desks in panic. Startled-looking Nairbs huddled down here, and as one they turned to look at us in surprise. I’d seen pictures, but had never met up with them personally. They had bulbous faces the color and consistency of thick green pea soup inside of a water balloon. To me, the aliens resembled their chairs: they looked like beached seals.

  They all began squawking at once in their own language when they realized who we were. I’m sure if I could have understood them, I’d feel insulted. As it was, I ignored them and pushed through the mass of their bodies to the doors.

  The doors weren’t your typical affair from Earth. There was no automatic swishing sound, or obvious pad to put your hand on. Instead, I was confronted with a bank of large rods in various positions. I figured they were switches of some kind, as they could be moved up and down in various directions. But which way to move them?

  Carlos followed me, bumping through the crowd of angry Nairbs.

  “Do these guys bite?” he asked.

  “Only your bank account. Come here and help me get this open.”

  “You’re nuts, you know that? Why do you want to open the doors? The saurian guards will murder us.”

  “I’m not trying to open the door. I’m trying to open the big gates outside. I want to let our troops inside the walls.”

  All the while we talked, I worked various levers experimentally. I tried them one at a time. Most seemed to do nothing, while a few caused the sounds of grinding machinery to start up, then stop.

  Carlos ignored me. He walked over to a box on one of the Nairbs desk. He adjusted it, and suddenly sound poured forth. The sound turned into an incomprehensible babble of angry voices.

  “It’s a translator unit,” he said. “I’m trying to dial it for earthers.”

  Seeing what he was doing, a small Nairb with a band around its neck waddled forward and nosed the device. Large yellow teeth snapped at Carlos’ hands, and he pulled them away quickly. The Nairb worked at the device, making careful choices.

  “Do you understand this, barbarian?” the box asked.

  “Ah, yes!” Carlos said. “It works!”

  “Excellent. You have accrued seven criminal charges since you entered my awareness. I order you to perform self-execution.”

  That made us look up. The Nairb had our full attention. Nairbs didn’t make idle threats or demands. They were as unpleasant in personality as they were in appearance, but they followed rules to the letter. This concerned me, because as far as I could tell, we hadn’t done anything yet to warrant execution.

  “Self-execution? On what grounds?” I asked the blob.

  “Your attack upon this facility was monitored—as was everything you’ve done since arriving here on Cancri-9. Damaging this property is not in your contract. You have violated Galactic Law through willful breach of contract.”

  I looked at Carlos, and he looked back at me. Our visors we
re clear now that we were inside and the blinding light of Cancri’s suns wasn’t burning overhead. I could see that Carlos was as worried as I was. Trade contracts were more important than any other element of Galactic Law. They took it very seriously, as the entire fabric of their empire was based upon it.

  “We’re not aware of any violation,” I said angrily.

  Carlos lifted his hand and waved urgently for me to stop talking. I fell quiet, wondering if he knew how to handle these beings.

  I noticed the Nairbs had shut up, too. They were no longer a pack of barking seals. Instead, they were a quiet, vengeful group that stared in eager anticipation.

  “You have not performed as ordered,” said the Nairb. “Refusal to comply is an additional crime. Penalties may be elevated if you continue to resist.”

  I wasn’t too worried about elevated penalties, as I was already up for self-execution. How were things going to get any worse?

  But then I reminded myself that things could get worse. Our unit, our legion, our ship—even our race could be penalized if the crime was big enough.

  “What violation has been performed?” Carlos asked. His usual joking tone was absent.

  “Do you refuse to comply?”

  “No,” he said firmly. “I do not refuse to comply. I’m requesting clarification.”

  “That is permissible to a point,” said the Nairb. “Your contract strictly forbids the use of aircraft during this campaign. That stipulation has been violated.”

  “Aircraft?” I asked, interrupting. “Are you talking about the air car we used to come here? That isn’t Earth equipment. It doesn’t count.”

  Again, Carlos waved for me to be quiet.

  “High Justice,” Carlos said. “I’m sorry if there has been a misunderstanding. But no aircraft have been brought from our world to this world.”

  “That is not germane to the violation. Aircraft were used in this conflict.”