“Go! Go! Go! I’ll cover you!” He heard his voice but didn’t believe the words until he was splashing, knee-deep, through the water. Rocks shifted under his feet, trying to trip him, as he aimed the Mauler into the blackness. He heard the sound of the others crossing behind him and took a quick look, relieved to see that the water was no more than waist deep. More rounds landed on their side of the ridge, making him flinch with each air-tearing explosion. The flashes of illumination allowed him to see that the stream was just that, and not a river requiring a bridge.
Maybe they don’t live in water this shallow.
The thought conjured up the monsters, and in the dancing, bursting light he saw one of them rear up out of the water as if trying to get a better look. It was barely ten yards in front of him, and he shouted in fright just before the Mauler went off. His reflexive shot hit the serpent dead on with the weapon’s multiple pellets, and it flipped over backward as if hooked by an unseen fisherman. The air around him came alive, buffeting him first one way and then another, as more rounds impacted near the water’s edge. Dirt and rocks and dead plants slapped him, but he kept his feet because of the sight before him.
In the changing light he saw the swirling surface turn to gold and then orange and then white, easily making out the disturbances as the predators came at him under the water. He turned the Mauler on the nearest one as if in a bad dream, knowing it was pointless but doing it anyway and hoping that the end would be swift. The weapon jumped in his hands and the swirling water rippled with shot, but he might just as well have saved it because they were no longer after him.
The serpent he had shot first was thrashing about madly, and the others converged on him in a horrifying rush. They weren’t as big as the ones from the river, but they were just as grotesque as they leapt from the water and pounced on their wounded fellow. The water churned in the light, and Mortas ran from it as much from revulsion as from relief at deliverance.
He rushed after the splashing sounds of the others escaping, lifting his knees high and expecting at any moment to be pulled down from behind. The far bank was only yards away now, and it was almost level with the water. Gorman appeared out of the gloom, running into the water, ducking in the flash of another explosion, grabbing his arm and pulling him forward. The next moment they were out, still running, passing between two boulders and almost colliding with Cranther and Trent. The man and the woman stood stock-still with their hands in the air as if surrendering, and as Mortas cleared the rocks a rough pair of hands yanked the Mauler from his grasp.
Something heavy clubbed him in the kidney, and he reeled forward into Trent. She caught him easily, but when Gorman was likewise propelled into her she backpedaled just a bit. It was then that Mortas saw the other figures, looming up to shove her back into position. In another burst of light he saw a Scorpion rifle, standard issue for human infantry, and the chest-and-torso armor he’d worn in training. Two human soldiers stood behind Trent and Cranther, and Mortas whooped in joy at the sight.
“Hey! Hey!” He stepped toward them, reaching out. “Am I glad to see you! I’m Lieutenant Jander Mortas!”
The barrel of the Scorpion gun came up into his face and a tired voice commanded, “Step back or I will fucking shoot you.”
“Funny thing about this war. Sims look like us, walk like us . . . but they can’t talk like us.” Mortas inclined his head in order to catch the words as they walked. The humans they’d literally bumped into had turned out to be a patrol led by a senior sergeant from the battalion staff of the mechanized infantry unit that had assaulted the planet days earlier. The big, beefy man wore shoulder armor over the olive drab one-piece uniform of the riding infantry and carried a stubby assault weapon known as the Flayer. The six-man patrol was a mixed bag of the survivors from the armored assault force and a company of non-mechanized infantry normally referred to as walkers. Mortas judged two of them to be the latter; their shoulder-and-torso armor and Scorpion rifles were too bulky and too long to fit comfortably inside the confines of a personnel mover.
The enemy’s inability to even imitate human speech had convinced the sergeant they were friendlies, but that hadn’t meant they’d reached salvation. The abandoned unit was almost out of food, so it was a lucky thing that they’d found something to eat before meeting this bunch. The armored battalion had lost well over half its strength in the attack, including most of its key leaders, and Mortas was already sensing that important positions were now filled by people with little experience in those jobs. The sergeant had already warned Mortas that the new commander, a major who’d been the assault battalion’s supply officer, might not accept them as easily as he had. When asked why that might be the case, he’d refused to answer and simply looked away.
Walking along behind the man, Mortas studied the Flayer and remembered its nickname was “the Failure” because it jammed so easily and had such limited range. One of the other soldiers now carried his Mauler, and they’d walked for some distance before Mortas realized the man had been unarmed until receiving the enemy weapon. As a group the patrol’s members looked pretty ragged. The two walkers still had their helmets, head-hugging protection that also housed their communications gear, but only two of the others had theirs. He imagined they’d taken them from dead walkers the same way the platoon sergeant had gotten his shoulder armor, and noted bandages on several arms and legs.
Most important, he noticed how tired they all seemed. The man in the lead appeared half asleep, trudging along a well-worn path with his eyes on the ground and his weapon hanging from his shoulder. Even the two from the walking infantry, who could be expected to be more proficient at dismounted patrolling, struck him as disturbingly careless.
“But don’t be too worried about meeting Major Shalley.” The sergeant spoke up suddenly, returning to the earlier topic with an abruptness that Mortas sensed was caused by a true fear of their commander-by-default. He glanced over his shoulder at Cranther, and the scout gave him a look of concern. “He knows his stuff, he knows the enemy, and he’s gonna get us off this rock.”
The last man in the file, walking behind Cranther, snorted briefly before covering it with a loud clearing of his voice. After so many days of whispering to avoid detection, Mortas cringed at the sound. The stars had finally reappeared, allowing him to make out the man-sized rocks and low grass around him, but it was still dark out and noise travels farther in the dark.
“So what happened with the assault?” he whispered, hoping the sergeant would pick up on the lower volume. The man replied as if they were standing together in a crowded room.
“Damndest thing I ever saw. Our battalion and one company of walkers went in as the first wave, we were cruising straight for their settlement, and then they fired these rockets . . . sensors said it was standard stuff, nothing to worry about, we were buttoned up anyway . . . but then they burst into all these smaller rockets, like thousands of arrows, and they came down on us.”
He cleared his throat. “Made a racket on the armor but no real effect . . . and then . . . we started . . . slowing down. That dirt just turned into mud. Thick, deep . . . the vehicles started to get stuck.”
The sergeant’s breathing became more audible, and Mortas wondered if he was the first person the man had been able to tell this story to because the others had all been there.
“The heavier ones sank fast, but the lighter ones were slewing around so badly that they were running into each other. We were taking some anti-personnel rounds too, like the stuff they were firing tonight, but we were safe inside the vehicles . . . until somebody asked if we were actually going to sink all the way.
“I swear somebody asked that over the radio, and the next thing you knew, somebody else in another carrier was screaming that we were sinking all the way, and then it started.” He tripped over a small rock, and took a second to kick it even though it was half buried and didn’t move. �
��Fuckin’ thing. Anyway, that’s when people began bailing out. Hatches flying open, ramps dropping, guys jumping . . . of course the first ones either disappeared into the soup or got stuck up to their armpits, so the rest of us were just up there, sitting on top of our own armor while it got lower and lower . . .
“It was like we were on the deck of a sinking ship. The anti-personnel rounds started coming again—they must have had spotters somewhere—and so then there wasn’t a choice. Most of the carriers had stopped sinking by then—we didn’t know it but the stuff turns back into dry dirt pretty fast—but now we had to get off of them.” His voice got even louder, and the words tumbled one after the other. “Some guys went back inside and you couldn’t convince ’em to come out, other guys climbed down and tippy-toed off toward the rocks, people throwing away anything that made them heavier—”
“Musta been hell.” Mortas cut him off, seeing that the man was becoming disturbed. The sergeant’s head snapped up at him, as if he’d been insulted, but he stopped talking. They kept moving, and his hurt expression slowly eased away. Hitching the Flayer’s sling where it rested across his armor, he tried to assume a more normal tone.
“Yeah, yeah, it was rough. But we’d never seen anything like that before, that’s all. And neither had Command, because they cancelled the follow-on waves. We’d regrouped up in the hills by then, and the Sims hadn’t come looking for us yet, so we figured they’d drop another cofferdam and pull us out.”
“That’s when they stopped answering our calls.” The soldier behind Cranther spoke, his words sounding like a shout. “It took us a while to figure out they ran off.”
“I told you, they probably saw enemy ships coming!” The sergeant turned and glared at the last man. “And they’ll be back for us.”
He looked down at Cranther, who had stopped walking to avoid bumping into Mortas. The scout regarded the big man with a face that was completely devoid of expression, but perhaps that was why it demanded a response. “Believe it, Spartacan. Back on Primus they left us for the same reason, but they came back later. You ever heard of Primus? We were outnumbered three to one, but by the time the fleet got back we were the only living things on that planet. We killed ’em all.”
“Good story, Sarge. Except the last part.” Cranther pointed past him, up the trail. Mortas turned to see that the rest of the patrol had continued walking and had almost disappeared in the night. The sergeant stepped up and poked Cranther with a finger of his own.
“What about the last part, little man?”
Mortas gently moved the scout past him, and the sergeant took a step back in recognition of Mortas’s authority. Cranther spoke over his shoulder as he went to catch up with the others.
“Nobody ever kills everybody anywhere, big man. Somebody always gets away.”
It didn’t take long to reach the base the survivors had established in a large ravine. They passed through a thin defensive perimeter on the surface consisting of tired-looking sentries, most of them soldiers from the riding infantry with little or no body armor. It was disturbing to see how dull and unfocused they acted; Mortas had spotted them from a good distance out and decided up close that they were walking around to avoid falling asleep.
They entered the ravine by an earthen ramp that had been packed down by many boot soles, suggesting to Mortas that the survivors had been in this spot for some time. They’d followed a well-trodden trail most of the way, yet another indication that this outfit wasn’t obeying the simplest rules for staying hidden. The maxims rolled through his mind: Don’t stay in one place for long. Don’t come back by the same route you used going out. Try to keep the natural camouflage in place as much as possible.
The ravine was deep, well over head high, and although some of the soldiers there were pulling guard on rough-hewn parapets, there seemed to be little rhyme or reason to how they were posted. Though new to the war zone, Mortas could still see gaping holes in the base security ring. Probably two dozen soldiers, a mix of riding and walking infantry, were laid out asleep in the wide ravine, and he and the others stepped over them as they followed the sergeant.
The rest of the patrol melted away, and the sergeant led the four new faces around a tight bend in the gully to meet the unit commander. The stars were fully out now, and small fluorescent stones in the walls in this part of the ravine reflected the light as if intentionally placed there. A lone man sat on a bench-like rock just a few yards away where the gully came to an end, his eyes on the dirt in front of him.
Mortas walked straight toward him, trying to remain hopeful that this senior officer knew what he was doing, but the sergeant grabbed his arm. The big man pointed at the center of the gully floor and asked, aghast, “Don’t you see that?”
Mortas looked at his feet, and the glowing illumination revealed an odd arrangement of stones, sticks, and narrow mounds that twisted this way and that. It reminded him of a horror movie he’d once seen on the Bounce, one involving a primitive tribe that had fashioned diabolical worship markers from natural elements. Mortas stared at it, dumbfounded, until Cranther whispered, “Sand table.”
That was it. He remembered creating similar terrain models in Officer Basic, although he and the other lieutenants had carried special kits for that purpose. Sand tables were a three-dimensional representation of an area where the unit operated or planned to operate, with ridges and hills created by mounding and shaping the dirt while roads and rivers were put in place using tools such as colored string or chalk shavings. Some of the sand tables he’d seen had been quite ambitious, but in a pinch natural items such as the rocks and twigs used here would suffice.
The man on the bench hadn’t moved or indicated that he was aware of their presence. He only slightly raised his head when the sergeant walked over and whispered in his ear.
Amazing. The noisy prick finally decides to be quiet. I wonder why.
Mortas stepped around the ground model and approached the two, as much to break up their secret conclave as to introduce himself. The man on the bench was nodding wordlessly, and the sergeant straightened up just as the lieutenant got within earshot. He flashed a fake smile at Mortas and then headed back down the gully with a purpose. Cranther, Gorman, and Trent had followed right behind Mortas, and as they got closer the reflected light from the stars showed that the commander was somewhere in his thirties, with tight-sheared hair over a round head. He wore the one-piece coverall of the mechanized troops, and a black shoulder holster containing a small pistol.
His eyes left the sand table when Mortas got close enough to touch him, but they were active and intelligent when he looked up. He gave a bloodless smile before speaking in a serene voice. “I’m Major Shalley. Who are you?”
“Lieutenant Jander Mortas, sir. I was being transported to—”
“Mortas? Now there’s a name. I’d ask if you were related to the senator, but there aren’t any senator’s sons out here.”
There’s one.
“I was being transported to a replacement center, sir. Our ship must have—”
“Where’s your platoon, Lieutenant?” The voice was still low, but an accusatorial edge had crept into it. The mouth hung slightly open, waiting.
Didn’t he hear me? Has he gone mad? My platoon?
A thought came to him then, a warm thought, and he turned and indicated the others with his hand. “This is my platoon, sir. We were marooned here a few days ago and just reached friendly lines.”
A brief snort. “Lines, he says . . . okay, Lieutenant, introduce me to your platoon.”
“This is Captain Amelia Trent, military psychoanalyst.”
The man’s face brightened somewhat. “Well we’ve got a few patients for you, Trent.”
She didn’t respond, so Mortas continued. “Corporal Cranther, Spartacan Scout.”
“A Spartacan, huh? We could have used you before t
hey put us down here.”
“And this is Chartist Gorman.”
“He seems to like my sand table.”
Mortas turned to see Gorman squatting at the edge of the model, an index finger moving in the air as if tracing the course of something in the diagram.
“He should, sir. We had no idea where we’d been put down, but he built an astrochart a lot like your sand table during our first night. Tracked the stars and figured out our location.”
“Well then.” The man stood up, his eyes back on the model. “Maybe he can tell me how we can gain access to the enemy’s spacedrome.”
“Is this it?” Gorman pointed at a ring of sticks laid out on the far side of the sand table. Now able to study the depiction, Mortas quickly made out the open ground where the unit’s abandoned vehicles were imprisoned. The wrecks were represented by a large number of small rocks or twigs stuffed into the sand. He imagined his little group emerging from that field after their scavenging expedition, hustling up the elongated pile of dirt that stood for the ridge they’d so recently fled. The model was extensive, showing several pieces of terrain they hadn’t yet encountered, but it didn’t include the bridge they’d used to get across the river. A minor depression lay between the wrecks and the enemy base, but the outlines of two landing strips suggested that was the spacedrome’s location.
Mortas glanced back at Major Shalley and then tried not to stare. The man was just standing there, his eyes fixed on the model but apparently seeing and hearing little.
“Excuse me, but we’ve been trying to determine where the settlement was located ourselves. Is that it?” Trent asked, pointing at the circle of sticks.
“Oh yes.” The major answered as if in a dream. “You can see we had a nice straight shot at it from where they dropped us. And we were rolling along nicely when they hit us with that new ordnance. Turned the ground into mud and, well, we’ve been on foot ever since. Done a fair bit of scouting, though.”
Glory Main Page 14