“We found something, Sergeant Lrator,” came a call over the comm. “Looks like the footprint of something on the cavern floor.”
“Human?”
“I, uh, don’t know, Sergeant Lrator,” came the reply, causing Lrator to curse under his breath. Of course the stupid lower-ranked soldiers wouldn’t know. In fact, he wouldn’t have been surprised if no one in the Xlatan company knew what a Human foot looked like, much less an entire Human. The ignorance of his comrades was embarrassing to the medic/biologist.
“I’ll be right there. Touch nothing until I…”
“What’s this,” said another voice over the comm. “It looks like…”
The Xlatan warrior never got to finish telling everyone what it looked like, whatever it was. The shock wave of a small blast flew through the air while the rock underneath shook slightly.
Lrator dropped to all sixes and broke into a run, pushing other Xlatan to the side as he barreled through. From the sound of the explosion, his services as a medic would be needed.
One trooper lay on the ground, obviously dead, with the front of his environmental suit ripped out and shredded flesh revealing his internal thoracic organs. He lay slack on the ground. There was nothing to be done for that one.
The other two might be saved. One was missing a forward right arm, while another lay back against a wall with his hands over his abdomen.
“What was it?” Lrator asked, squatting on his four rearmost members while he dug into his medic’s bag and pulled out a nanopatch.
The trooper let out a groan, then started to talk in a low voice while the sergeant gently placed the patch over the ragged edge of the stump. The patch immediately adhered and worked its way up the stump, sealing off the blood vessels.
“Shramm there picked up a small object that looked like some discarded ration can,” the wounded soldier said.
Lrator moved over to the other soldier, running a small scanner over his body with a hollow feeling in his stomach. The soldier had suffered considerable internal damage. If he could be gotten to a hospital, soon, he might survive. Unfortunately, they were more than an hour from the surface, and the soldier would be dead in less than fifteen minutes. He’d be in agony the entire time.
“And what happened then?” the sergeant asked, pulling out an injector and setting the dose carefully. He patted the soldier on the shoulder, then pushed the injector through the suit and into the flesh underneath.
“The ration can flew into the air on a jet, then exploded outward,” continued the soldier who would survive.
The hand of the other fell from his abdomen and he slumped down. Lrator ran the scanner over him again, then closed his eyes and said a quick prayer for the soul of the fallen. The overdose of pain medication had stopped his hearts in an instant, and the soldier had gone peacefully into the dark instead of suffering.
Xlatan believed in being able to handle pain—in being tough—but the medic had his own beliefs, and suffering for the sake of suffering wasn’t one of them.
“Can you walk?” Lrator asked the injured male after giving him an injection of pain medication, in his case a survivable dose.
“I think so,” the soldier said, pushing himself into a bipedal stance. “I won’t be able to run.”
“Just do the best you can. And everyone else listen up. If you see something you don’t recognize, keep your hands off of it. Call me or Krassh up to look at it.” Preferably me, he thought, though he couldn’t say it.
There were many replies coming over the comm, some with a tone of fright, others with surly resignation.
“Then let’s move out.”
“What about our two comrades? Shouldn’t they receive a burial?”
Lrator closed his eyes and cursed again under his breath. “Do you see any soil we can bury them in?” he asked, looking at the gathered troopers. “Do any of you want to carry them?”
He didn’t get an answer to either question, which told him what he needed to know.
“If we catch the Humans and end up coming back this way, we can carry them back with us.” And we’re fortunate the Humans didn’t follow up their trap with an attack, he thought, looking around and noting that there were no soldiers on guard; everyone was standing around staring at their dead and wounded.
“Tactical formation at all times!” he shouted into the comm, grabbing the arm of the nearest soldier and pushing the Xlatan in the direction they were going. “Stand around like idiots and you’ll be killed. I really don’t care so much about that, but you might take me with you.”
The troopers moved with alacrity, and due to that reaction, Lrator thought he would indeed make an effective officer.
* * *
Jonah stopped and held up a hand when he felt the slight shudder through the ground. Several seconds later, the faint boom of the explosion propagated through the thin air.
“Well, our trap has gone off,” Charley said, a tone of triumph in his voice.
“But what set it off?” Jonah asked, looking back the way they’d come. The bomb was three miles back, which meant the Xlatan chasing them were that far back as well. Which meant they’d been closing the distance.
“We can hope our furry friends did it,” Joey said, shrugging his shoulders.
“But how many did it take out?” Ivan asked, busy setting up another trap, this one quite a bit different than the first, or the other two he had set behind them.
“How many do you think?” Jonah asked, looking through his helmet HUD zoom function and seeing nothing due to the intervening terrain.
“Not more than a couple,” Ivan said, shrugging his wide shoulders. “Even if they were gathered in a clump. I still think we should’ve put more into that first booby trap.”
“If we had,” Charley said, walking up to stand chest to chest with the scout, “we might have used all of our explosives for nothing.”
“Now they’ll have to take more care in advancing,” Jonah said, stepping between his two friends before it became a shoving match.
Everyone is on edge, the colonel thought. He couldn’t blame them. They were trained to move and fight in a terrestrial environment, not in this unbreathably-thin atmosphere in freezing temps, locked in their environment suits. And with an enemy on their tail. They’d only carried on so well because of their training and esprit de corps, but tempers were frayed, and it wouldn’t take much to get them fighting among themselves.
“I’m tired of running,” Manny Fernandez growled, pulling his machete from its sheath. “Why don’t we make a stand and fight?”
“We don’t know how many there are,” Basil complained.
Jonah was looking around as the rest argued. The terrain looked good. The path sloped upward and gained thirty yards over the next couple of hundred. The area at the top had a lot of cover from rocks. And up there…
“Sandra, could you and Sarah get a good field of fire from that platform up there?” he asked, pointing to a ledge along a fifty-yard-wide rock support.
“I think we could get a perfect field of fire up there,” the sniper replied, nodding, “if you promise you’ll give us cover to get down when it’s time.”
“I think we can promise that,” the colonel said, his eyes still roaming the area looking at where to place the rest of his team. “Then that’s what we’ll do. It’s time to kick those furry bastards in the teeth and chase them screaming back the way they came.”
Everyone started talking at once. A few were against the idea, but most sounded excited to finally have a chance to strike back at their pursuers. And what better place, in an environment where the enemy couldn’t use their air superiority.
“This is how we’ll do it. But I want to make it clear that we’re going to conserve as much of our firepower as possible during this engagement. Only shoot if you have a good target. Otherwise, lay and wait. Clear?”
The acknowledgements came back, and now there were no dissenting voices.
“Good. Then let’s get to
it.”
* * * * *
Chapter Nine
Mmrash sat in the copilot’s chair of the gunship, studying the Tri-V above the control board. Two of the shuttles, those whose troops had gone below, sat on the ledge to either side of the gunship. What use was flying around when they knew where the enemy was, and there was no way the aircraft could do anything to them? The two remaining shuttles had gone down to the midlands below, one to sit, while the other flew around watching for the Humans to reappear.
I hope we can kill them out in the open, the commander thought, reading about the species with a feeling of dread, almost horror, running through him. He’d been going over the records they had on the Humans. He’d assumed they were fairly weak, thin-skinned creatures. Smarter than most species, but nowhere near the brightest in the Galaxy. From what he’d read so far, that assumption could come back to bite him.
It’s like they don’t know how to give up, he thought, reading about their second global war during a period they called their twentieth century. One coalition had reached a point halfway through when there was no way they could win. No possible way. Their reaction was to fight even harder. One power had to be invaded and all of their lands taken, while the other one, the truly mad nation, had been struck with the first atomic weapons on their world before they’d surrendered, but only after the ruler had dismissed the opinions of his subordinates who wanted to fight on. Insanity. If this one instance wasn’t enough, there were references to time after time when the Humans refused to surrender.
The Xlatan were a fierce species, as brave as any, yet they would still give up, or at least flee to another region, if the only other alternative was to see their entire clan destroyed. They’d warred on each other for millennia, but those were all clan affairs—maybe a couple of thousand warriors, a hundred times that, at most. When one side had lost about half their warriors, surrender was the only option. The Humans rallied armies in the millions and fought campaigns of slaughter. Every time the technology got to the point where it seemed wars would be unimaginable, they found another way to fight them. How in all the hells did they survive their atomic era?
His people had survived because no clan would destroy the environment they all depended on. Somehow the Humans had survived without that imperative. No matter the technology, no matter the disparity of forces, the creatures showed surprising initiative and creativity in devising the means to fight and win. Now they were a world at peace, one that hadn’t seen a real war in centuries. The Galactic Union had seen to that. They were still primitive compared to the most powerful of the species. The only thing they had to sell, just like the Xlatan, were their warriors. The best warriors among their billions of people, given the best equipment they could get.
Initiative, intelligence, stealth. They were formidable in their way, but surely a species descended from arboreal fruit eaters couldn’t possibly be a match for beings sprung from predators. That brought up the next unsettling fact. Those arboreal fruit eaters had come down from the trees, learned to walk in a bipedal stance, and became the preeminent predators in a predator-rich environment, without the natural tools of the other killers. His own people had become tool users, but on the hunt they still depended on what nature had given them.
Mmrash pulled up a Tri-V of the Humans, male and female. They did look weak, and slow, but they possessed a brain case as large as any Xlatan. Probably larger. They didn’t even have protective fur on their bodies, which made them susceptible to the weather, unlike his people. Now the glandular system that allowed them to cool their bodies efficiently, that was a wonderful adaptation. Still, they didn’t have a lot of natural weapons. They had no claws, and their teeth were pathetic. He doubted that a Human at his throat could even cut through his fur, much less the skin and muscle underneath.
But the weapons they developed. His people had weapons. Swords, spears, blunt crushing instruments. The Humans had developed a hundred martial traditions. They had tamed animals for use in warfare, some of which, like the elephant, were formidable beasts. Not all traditions were equal. The Europeans had rolled over the peoples who didn’t have gunpowder weapons, but those people had still fought back with ferocity.
A short video started playing, showing Humans engaging in athletic events, and he quickly revised his opinion of their physical prowess. Some manifested strength to the extreme, lifting almost twice what the strongest of his people could. Some could cover distances with great speed, and their distance runners could outpace most species over a long course. Because of their cooling system? He had no doubt the average Xlatan could display greater strength and much greater speed than the average Human, but they weren’t talking about averages here. These people would be the best of the best, and he’d sent two squads down to face them in a region where his clan’s aircraft were useless.
Finally, he pulled up a video of the creature this company was named after. It was a large bird, with talons as long and sharp as any on his world, and a beak that looked like a pair of cutting blades. The creature looked at him out of the Tri-V, and that gaze showed a fierceness he had not often seen. Fierce Eagles indeed, he thought, a shiver running down his spine.
All of a sudden, the commander didn’t feel so good about his chances of stopping these people. He dismissed the thought. He was Xlatan, and he was an officer of his people. It was cowardly to think of defeat before it happened. He would hunt them down, and he would kill them; of that he was sure.
“Sir,” came a call over the comm, and he recognized the voice of Lrator. “We have made contact with the Humans.”
There was the sound of something cracking through the air, then the crump of an explosion.
“Gather them up, Sergeant. And try to take at least one alive if you can.”
“That might be harder than we thought, commander,” the sergeant said, an edge of panic to his voice. “There are at least a dozen of them.”
Mmrash felt a hollow weight in his stomach. He’d hoped there would at most be a half dozen of the Humans. Now it seemed that most of the people on the shuttle had survived, and he wondered if he’d sent two squads of his people to their deaths.
* * *
“I’ve got you, you bastard,” whispered Sandra Clemenceau under her breath, steadying her rifle as she placed the crosshairs of the scope over the face of one of the Xlatan. The only part of the face she could see were the eyes peering out of the helmet visor, since the rest was swaddled in cold-weather clothing. She didn’t want to attempt a shot through that visor. The rifle would probably punch through, but she wanted a sure kill.
Her finger squeezed the trigger in a smooth, practiced motion. The rifle pushed into her shoulder from the recoil as the ten-millimeter round flew silently out of the barrel, propelled up to two thousand meters a second by the magnetic accelerator of the weapon. It was the perfect sniper rifle, in her opinion. Silent, with no betraying flash, fast enough that the round travelled a basically flat trajectory over several thousand yards, and capable of blasting through just about any light armor. It wouldn’t go through the armor of a CASPer, not at its current setting, but she could ramp up the acceleration quite a bit more.
The round struck in the lower face of the creature, blasting through the cloth and the light armor of the environmental suit below. It didn’t pack enough punch to go all the way through, but then it didn’t need to. The head of the Xlatan warrior rocked back, then the body fell forward, its weapon falling out of its hands.
Sarah Cohen fired a half second after Sandra. Her weapon was much more powerful, throwing a twelve-millimeter round out at three thousand meters per second. Sandra still wasn’t sure how the other woman handled it, even with the bipod deployed to take up most of the recoil. Handle it she did, though, and well, and the round made to blast through heavy armor took the head off her target. Bright orange blood fountained into the air from the arteries that had been feeding the now-dead brain, and the Xlatan actually fell backward from the force of the strike.
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The remaining Xlatan hit the ground, crawling for cover as soon as they were down. The rest of the company opened fire, and a couple of the enemy were hit before they got behind something. The rest started to return fire with their lasers, their beams invisible until they actually hit something. At that point the puff of vapor and the glow of heat indicated the hit.
The laser was the better weapon in most circumstances, since it was a totally flat trajectory and its time of flight was basically instantaneous. The Eagles had a reason for not using them, and as a dozen twenty-five-millimeter grenades exploded in the air over the enemy, that reason became apparent.
* * *
“Good shooting,” Jonah said into the comm as Amobi Kabir fired off a burst from his grenade launcher.
The weapon was as silent as any they had, but the grenade detonated in the air less than a second after firing, going off in a sequence at the specified range. Shrapnel was thrown downward, as programed, and though the colonel hoped they’d caused some damage to the enemy, that really hadn’t been the purpose. The smoke the grenades released dropped down and hung in the air, and suddenly every laser beam was highlighted. It was like the enemy had pointers leading the eye right back to the shooter.
“Get that cluster over there, Amobi,” the colonel ordered.
A moment later a string of grenades descended on the three Xlatan whose lasers pointed them out. The grenades reached the programed range and curved down on their miniature rockets, exploding right on top of the enemy soldiers. One continued to fire, but the other two lasers winked out and never returned to action.
“I’m hit,” Achilles Antonopolis called out in a voice filled with shock.
“I’m on it,” replied Dotty Farrah, their medic.
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