Steel World

by Larson, B. V.

  It was a strange situation. We both knew there was nowhere to run. The second we stepped out of cover the alien soldier would burn us down. But we weren’t panicking, not really. When you know death will be quick and temporary, it’s more of a feeling of personal defeat and honor than it is a matter of terror and desperation. At the same time, I found I still didn’t want to die.

  Harris lifted the grenade and put his finger on the timer. I saw him reduce it to zero. My eyes widened.

  “Going to wait until he’s right on top of us?”

  He nodded. “You and I are going to Hell together tonight, McGill.”

  The impossibly heavy tread grew louder and closer. I felt my guts tighten and churn. My throat burned as my stomach tossed acid up into it. Despite my intellectual certainty that I would live again, my body was beginning to get worried. I guess you can’t erase a million years of instinct with a few months of training.

  Harris got up into a squatting position with one hand on the grenade. His thumb was hovering, and the shell of the device was already leaking power. In order to build enough of a charge for an instantaneous reaction, I knew the grenade had to cycle up before you triggered the ignition.

  “Want me to stand and distract?”

  “Go for it, Recruit!”

  I waited until the last possible second. I stood up and there was a shout in my helmet from other nearby troops. Then, a blinding flash went off in my face. My only thought was one of regret: I hadn’t even gotten to shoot the dino in defiance.

  For some reason, I had enough time for a follow-up thought: Why am I not dead yet?

  I was standing there, blinded, but I could still feel my rifle so I pulled the trigger and held onto it. I fired at where the saurian had been—where he had to be.

  Something kicked my calves. There it was. I’d finally been hit, I figured. I probably had no legs by now.

  I went down, and a hand shook me. I was shouting hoarsely.

  “McGill! Shut up, you idiot. He’s gone.”

  I stopped struggling. I could feel my breath hitting my faceplate inside my helmet and bouncing back, warming my face with steamy puffs.

  “What?” I asked. “Who’s gone?”

  “The saurian. The weaponeers blew him away. Pull yourself together, man.”

  I tried, I really did, but it took a few minutes. My vision slowly returned during this time, and I figured out what had happened.

  When the saurian had walked up to us preparing to burn us down to slag, the weaponeers Leeson had been organizing had burned him instead. The blinding flash hadn’t been his weapon burning me, it had been their heavy tubes hitting his force field. The resulting energies that had been released had caused a blinding flash of radiance.

  When I could think and see again, with purple and green splotches occluding much of my vision, I saw Harris. He was leaning against the slag heap, toying with his last plasma grenade.

  As I watched, he thumbed the timer back up to five seconds again and put it back onto his belt.

  -29-

  The latest phase of the battle was soon over. They’d hit us hard and hurt us—but they hadn’t taken us out. The saurians had sent up six drilling machines, each loaded with a team of heavily-armed lizards. Altogether, they must have killed hundreds of us, but our weaponeers had killed all of them.

  I was in a ruined bunker with Leeson, Harris and a dozen other fighters. None of us had eaten or bathed today. Our survivors were scattered around the compound in small groups, waiting for the saurians to start a new attack.

  “I’d expected a big, organized battle,” I told Harris. “This is anything but. Why don’t they hit us with everything they have and finish this one way or another? They have the numbers.”

  Harris chuckled and shrugged. It was Leeson who answered me.

  “I wish they would just charge in here and finish this too, Recruit,” he said, “but they won’t play it that way. They’re trying to win everything right here, and it’s making things all the more painful for us.”

  “Sir?” I asked, confused. “Win what?”

  “The planet, the contract—the whole thing. This is it. That’s what the brass up on the ship suspects, and I’m pretty sure they’re right.”

  I shook my head, still confused. I looked around at the devastation. Around us, the spaceport was in shambles. There were no more lifters coming and going. There were no troops in sight other than our reduced forces. A lot of dark holes yawned in the puff-crete walls.

  Leeson looked at Harris wearily. “Should I bother to explain it to him?”

  “Suit yourself, sir,” he said. He had his helmet off and had made a hat out of his smart-cloth shirt. He tipped his makeshift hat over his eyes and made himself comfortable on a pile of rubble.

  “You see, troops,” Leeson said, addressing others who were listening in, “Legion Varus cheats—all of Earth’s legions do. How do you think we’ve won so many battles? Our weapons are good, are tactics are superb—but really, it comes down to not taking permanent losses. Our troops return to the fight, sometimes before the battle is over. That’s how we win so often. Tech at the level of our revival units is rare in our quadrant of the galaxy. As far as I know, only the Galactics and Earth forces have it.”

  “Are the revival machines that expensive?” I asked.

  “Yes, insanely expensive. But it’s more than that. Every world in the Empire only gets so many credits to spend from their trading. Each government must choose very wisely what to purchase with them—spending on frivolities is an easy a way to doom your race to low status in the empire, so most of the credits are reinvested. We bought this tech—revival machines—because it made our method of gaining credits more secure. Our soldiers come back to life when they die, surviving to become superior fighters. We might lose battle after battle, but we always win the war in the end. We never run out of troops, and that makes us the best.”

  I wasn’t sure I got the message. I looked around at the rest of the recruits, and they looked as baffled as I was. Kivi was among them. She raised her eyebrows at me questioningly. I shook my head in return. I didn’t really get it, either.

  “It’s about body count, that’s all,” Harris chimed in. “That’s what the Adjunct is getting at. That’s all the Galactics understand, anyway. They’re accountants at heart. If your troops are still standing when the dust settles and you took fewer losses, you won.”

  “Carry on, Harris,” Leeson said. “I’m going to check on our firing positions.”

  He got to his feet and left.

  “Are you saying the Galactics are watching us and scoring this battle?” I asked Harris.

  “Exactly,” Harris said.

  “And they’re just trying to see how many each side can kill?”

  “Right.”

  I thought about that. Without revival units, we couldn’t win in the end. The saurians outnumbered us and they would just keep coming.

  “So this is to the last man, sir?” I asked.

  Harris finally removed his hat and looked at me with bloodshot eyes. “You’ve finally got it, kid.”

  “But how can anyone tell if the Galactics are watching right now? Isn’t that just guesswork—unless you run into one the way I did? They’ve been watching several battles from what I could see.”

  He nodded slowly. “Normally, that would be true. But things aren’t going normally. First off, you—and I do mean you here, McGill—have killed a Galactic. Twice.”

  I shifted on my haunches uncomfortably. “I didn’t know what it was.”

  “You think they care about that?”

  “But how does that change the situation?”

  He shook his head at me as if I was being slow. Maybe I was.

  “The Galactics have it in for us. They have since the beginning. I tell you, the fix is in. They’re scoring this fight, the one where we don’t have the revival machines. So this time, we can’t make one troop come back to life over and over. We can’t make it look like h
e never died. We’ll have to confess our real losses.”

  I thought about that. “Body count… You’re telling me we really do cheat to keep our position? We get contracts because it looks like we always win…because our troops are still alive when it’s over?”

  “Yeah, that’s about right. It’s not that way on every world, but this is a tough one, with a tough local competitor. They’ve studied our methods for years. All those crazy contracts, asking us to protect every snot-nosed heir and mining complex… The saurians have rigged this game. We fell into it face first, too. We even pissed off the judges: the Galactics, the Nairbs—everyone. Now, when this mess is over, the Nairb accountants will come out here and count bodies, living and dead. We won’t be around to hide the evidence. The results will be clear. The saurians will have won with fewer losses.”

  “But what about tech and firepower?” asked Kivi, suddenly. “Why doesn’t the tribune send down his heavies to relieve us?”

  “He might, but I bet he won’t,” answered Harris. “He’s doing the calculus, too. He knows that the level of armament counts. The number we start with counts against us, as well. He could have sent the heavy units right away—but didn’t. If he relieved us now that would make the battle bigger and erase any claim we could make that we were outgunned. I’m sure he’s playing it the best he can, from his point of view. But no matter what, I think we’re screwed.”

  I thought about the revival units in a new light after that conversation. They weren’t just insurance policies for the unfortunate few. Our commanders thought of them as vital equipment. Our legions never ran out of troops. It was like having magic magazines that never ran out of ammo—a huge advantage. This was especially true when it came to scoring who won battles and who was the most effective fighter. In order to stay on top, we had to prove we were the best over and over.

  This time, however, we were going to lose.

  The next attack came in daylight when the sun was at its worst. The two hot suns of Cancri were fully revealed overhead with no cloud-cover to provide merciful relief. Inside our suits, our air-conditioners whispered and whirred with fans that struggled to keep up.

  In the early afternoon, I was dozing underground in a crater covered with slabs of leaning puff-crete. Harris came by, tapped my helmet and I jumped awake.

  He gestured with a thumb jabbing upward. I knew what that meant. I was my turn to do a twenty-minute shift on the surface, watching for the enemy.

  Like a gopher poking his head out of a hole, I warily crept up to the top of the rubble-heap we inhabited and looked around my position in a slow circle. Seeing nothing other than a few other gophers posted here and there around the compound, I got out my snap-rifle and gazed through the scope, increasing my range of vision.

  The scope automatically adjusted for the glaring light of the suns overhead. But still, it wasn’t enough to make the light pouring through into my eye socket completely comfortable. Squinting, I did my best to scan the area farther out, looking through the gaps in our walls and the mounds of metal shavings piled up around the entry holes their drillers had used the last time.

  Some of the guys in my unit were grumbling that only the recruits had to play gopher and do surface duty. I didn’t feel that way. Sure, we were at greater risk and felt more discomfort, but the others—the weaponeers, officers and our last few techs and bios—they needed to be protected. They were not as expendable as we were. In a siege, everyone was decidedly unequal.

  I didn’t like guard duty, especially around the fifteen minute mark when my air conditioner began to hiccup and the air in my helmet turned warm. But I understood that I wasn’t here to have a good time. If the enemy decided to hit us with their heavy troops again, only the weaponeers with their thick black tubes could kill them. Only the bios could repair the wounded, perhaps keeping our body count low. And the techs—well, they kept our suits, communications systems and other critical equipment functioning. Even now, they were underneath my position in the tunnels connecting our bunkers underground, so we could move between them without exposing ourselves. If the walls were penetrated by the enemy again, we now had vital cool spots for soldiers to rest and recuperate.

  What was I? Only a guy with a rifle. A lightly-trained, lightly-armed recruit who was on his first campaign. I could hardly demand nor expect special treatment.

  So I sat sweating and trying to adjust the cooling tubes in the fabric of my suit every minute or two. It was an impossible task, of course. Spots on the upper surfaces of my arms and helmet grew burning hot frequently. I tried to crouch in the shade of an overhang, but there was only partial cover. Overly-exposed to the radiation of Cancri, it was all I could do to sweat, mutter curses, and constantly check my tapper to see if my stint was up yet.

  When the finally hit us, I didn’t believe it at first, thinking that the shadows I saw moving through holes punched in the walls of the compound must be something else—anything other than what I knew they had to be.

  Then, the first jugger dipped its massive head into the hole and dripped saliva on the rubble. I froze for a fraction of a second. This was real, I told myself. I was facing a monster, and its spittle was steaming to vapor the instant it touched the hot stones.

  They’d told us the monsters wouldn’t come until evening. It was too hot out—even for them. They were native to this world, but in the warm season, even native animals kept to the cool green forests and the shade of their stark buildings. Most of the planet’s wildlife was nocturnal for very good reasons.

  But none of those assurances applied today. I was so hot, I wasn’t even sure I wasn’t hallucinating, but I wasn’t going to sit on my can, anyway. I swung my snap-rifle up, sighted on the left eye, and hammered out a burst of ten pellets.

  With one eye destroyed, the jugger reared up, roaring. Its great head struck the top of the hole it had leaned through, but a moment later it managed to pull back and disappeared.

  I opened a com-channel and tried to report the sighting, but it was unnecessary and nearly impossible. Everyone was chattering, giving orders, asking for confirmation—they’d all heard the firing and the roar. They knew it was time to scramble into our defensive positions.

  Harris came up behind me, looming close. His body blocked out the yellow sun. The red one was behind a building, and for that I was grateful. I stayed with my rifle sighted on the hole, but so far the jugger hadn’t reappeared.

  “Was that you firing, McGill?”

  “Yes, Veteran.”

  “Did you hit it?”

  “Took out an eye.”

  “Well done—did you know your AC is dead, kid?”

  I looked up at him for a moment. I had to admit, I did feel even hotter than I had a minute ago.

  “I thought I was just getting overexcited,” I said.

  He huffed at me. “Get below before you fry, you moron. I need every troop I have, even you. Take it to the techs, and have a bio check you for heatstroke.”

  “But, they’re about to hit us.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I know. Hurry.”

  I slithered from my position downward. Harris assumed my spot and I could hear him muttering curses about exposure and heat. That brought half a smile to my face. I rather liked hearing him suffer up there on the hot seat.

  I was staggering when I reached the central tunnels. A tech grabbed my arm and began working my tapper before I could speak.

  “Exhausted fuel cell,” she said. “Your generator isn’t recharging your cells.”

  “Can I get a new generator, please?”

  “No,” she said. “They’re on reserve for emergencies.”

  I nodded, but I was thinking that, as far as I was concerned, AC failure in a hundred fifty degrees was an emergency. But what did I know? I wasn’t a tech.

  Before I could say much else, she opened my back panel and rammed two new cells into place.

  “Without a generator you’ll have to switch these out every two hours—less, if you go out
onto the surface.”

  I mumbled a thank you and went in search of water. Harris had said something about bios, but right now, I needed a drink.

  The bios might be territorial about their equipment and a little nuts when it came to protecting secrets—but when they saw me weaving and wandering down the tunnel toward their station, they rushed out to help.

  Matis reached me first. He was tall and thin, with dark, serious eyes surrounded by deep worry-lines. He looked me over quickly and professionally.

  I’d first met Specialist Matis when the raptors had stolen the revival machine—he’d been one of the lucky people who’d escaped slaughter in that underground vault.

  “Where are you hit, Recruit?” he asked.

  “What?”

  “I don’t see any punctures,” said an orderly, talking over my head as if I wasn’t there. “But he seems disoriented.”

  “I really need a drink,” I said.

  “Get that helmet off him,” Matis ordered.

  Both the techs and the bios, I’d found, were extremely effective when it came to spotting trouble that they could fix. I didn’t struggle. I let them do their work.

  I sank down on the floor of the tunnel. Hands gripped my helmet and opened it. Cool air washed in a moment later. I sighed in relief. I hadn’t realized that it was cooler in the tunnel than it was inside my suit.

  “That’s better,” I said.

  Bio Specialist Matis was crouching over me, looking into my eyes, tapping on my tapper. He looked concerned. I marveled at how specialists thought nothing of taking over when they had you in their grasp.

  “Your blood levels are off,” he said. “I’m seeing toxins that shouldn’t be here. Have you been poisoned?”

  “I don’t think so. My suit AC shut down and I had my cells replaced.”

  “Is there a leak? Turn him over.”

  I felt hands grab me and flip me over. I felt like a kid, and I resisted slightly, then let them do it. I wasn’t too trusting of bios lately, but these people seemed to be trying to help.