Firemask: Book Two of the Last Legion Series

by Chris Bunch

  But the Force fought on.

  • • •

  Wlencing’s screens gave no more cheerful a set of figures than Angara’s. It wasn’t the continual casualties so much as other hard figures.

  Cumbre cost more, vastly more, to occupy than it gave back in profits to the clans exploiting the system. Only a trickle of ships took back minerals, luxury goods to the Musth worlds.

  The clanmasters who’d backed Asser and Wlencing would not continue the course into bankruptcy.

  Something must be done. Wlencing wished he had a clue as to what.

  • • •

  The block warden was quite proud of himself. He’d spotted the ambush team, two men, two women, waiting below his building for the security patrol, and notified the Musth on the special com he’d been given.

  The team was efficiently counterambushed by three dozen Musth warriors. Probably the assassins wouldn’t have tried to surrender, but the Musth didn’t give them the chance, blasting the four until their bodies were unrecognizable lumps of flesh.

  The warden was rewarded with credits, and begged the aliens not to praise him publicly.

  They agreed, but two nights later, just after midnight, the warden’s apartment was fire-bombed. He, his wife, their four children, and his wife’s mother died in the flames.

  His successor was a great deal less ambitious and more nearsighted.

  • • •

  The ten-man human patrol was trapped against cliffs in the piedmont near the Highlands. Unable to break contact, they fought back.

  Wlencing ordered his attack ships in. The crags were rocketed, bombed. But when the ringing explosions died away, and the dust settled, a defiant blaster would open fire from rocky concealment.

  Wlencing sent in warriors on the ground. Three days later, the last of the ten were killed. The Musth lost four wynt, an aksai and forty-three warriors.

  Both sides considered the engagement a defeat.

  • • •

  There was an explosion in one of Mellusin Mining’s deep shafts on C-Cumbre, of unknown but almost certainly natural causes.

  The surface had contact with the survivors down the mine, trapped in one of the stopes two kilometers underground, water rising from lower levels.

  The frantic rescue teams, realizing they couldn’t open a rescue shaft in time, called on the government for help.

  “Who are these miners?” Wlencing asked Daaf.

  “Mostly ‘Raum. A scattering of military prisoners and some criminals.”

  Wlencing thought for only a moment. “The request is denied. The present emergency forbids the expense.”

  Daaf chanced it: “War Leader, is that an honorable response?”

  Wlencing hissed rage, reflexively moved his claws in, out.

  “Do not ever use insolence like that again, or I shall have you returned to your clan!”

  Daaf stared at Wlencing for a moment, then left the compartment without an answer.

  Wlencing stared out at Silitric’s desolation, watched a storm building against the mountains, wondered what his response might have been a system-year ago.

  But that was then. Wlencing had never left a task unfinished, and this one would be no exception. There were too many Musth lives spent here, from Aesc to the lowest engine wiper, just to give up.

  As a cub, he’d wondered if the human-Musth war might not have ended in victory for the Musth if only his race had kept fighting, pushed harder.

  Now, on Cumbre, he would not let himself think about becoming a shirker like they had been.

  • • •

  The slow drowning of almost a hundred miners sent a shock wave across the Cumbre system. Rumor spreaders and Force merchants spread the word for a general strike.

  Wlencing heard of it, forbade it on the pain of reprisals.

  But on the set day, only a handful of businesses opened. Wlencing sent troops into the streets to force merchants to open their shops, but there were almost no customers.

  Worse, few of his human administrators, clerks, janitors, translators showed up for work.

  Wlencing raged, ordered all of them discharged, and his underlings obeyed.

  The strike ended, but the Musth stayed frozen without the human grease for their alien wheels. A few Musth appealed the ruling, but Wlencing announced firmly that once he had issued a dictat, it could not be rescinded.

  Very quietly, the more capable Musth leaders rehired, sometimes under false names, most of their old staff, and life returned, mostly, to as before.

  • • •

  “It doesn’t look like there’s any surprises here,” Angara said.

  “I haven’t found any,” Hedley said.

  Angara reran the computer speculation, then got up and paced the underground command center on Mullion Island. “Damn,” he said irrelevantly, “but it’s stuffy down here. I’d make a shitty ‘Raum.”

  Hedley was still staring at the screen.

  “We need to do something big, for our own sakes if nobody else’s,” Angara said.

  Hedley nodded. “The plan’s approved. Let’s move the day after tomorrow.”

  • • •

  Hedley’s agents had noticed a swarm of ships around the Highland base. Other agents found out these were the first of the freshly trained fliers, newly assigned to the fighting zone.

  Remembering a ghastly moment in Man’s history, Hedley named the plan Operation Nits.

  Just after dawn, as the Musth pilots were assembling, preparing for the day’s assignments, a wave of Zhukovs, armed yachts, and the Force’s sole remaining aksai attacked the Highland.

  They hit the field hard, rocketing anything they saw, strafing AA positions, aircraft still on the ground, anything moving. One pass, then another, and they fled, back toward their hideouts.

  But there were human casualties, ships shot down, crashed, or just crippled. One led to total disaster.

  Jacqueline Boursier, high overhead in her aksai, cursed as she saw a yacht, trailing smoke, limp over Mullion Island’s narrow beach, a wynt and two aksai harrying it.

  “Come on, you shitheel, bail out, goddammit, don’t let ‘em follow you home!”

  But the yacht’s pilot wasn’t listening, and pancaked his ship down in the middle of the secret base’s landing field, skating out of control, ripping away camou nets over bunkers, tents, gun emplacements, and revealing the long-held secret.

  Boursier swept down, fired, knocked out the wynt and with a second launch, blowing an aksai out of the air. But that was her last missile, and she watched the last Musth ship disappear back toward Dharma Island.

  • • •

  Three days later, the Musth attacked Mullion Island in full force — it’d taken that long for Wlencing to move troops from Silitric, and ready his formations for battle.

  They found no one — the Force had dispersed two days earlier.

  But they left machine shops, aircraft under repair, supply dumps and armories.

  The Force had lost its headquarters, its only effective base.

  CHAPTER

  26

  Unknown System/Unknown World

  “Poor bastards,” Monique Lir said, watching the two columns of Musth warriors trudge toward them from Keffa’s ship. “They outnumber us what, two to one?”

  “At least,” Njangu said. “Duck your heady-bone. Here comes their air.”

  Two aircraft soared out of a lock about halfway up the ship’s hill. They were small flits that could carry no more than four warriors.

  “Guess they went and forgot their aksai,” Monique said. “Shall I have a team Shrike ‘em, boss?”

  “What’s the chance of their pooh-bah, this Keffa, being on one of them?”

  “Eh,” Lir guessed, waggling her fingers, “six to five, either way.”

  “Then we’ll let ‘em stumble on in ignorance for a while. ‘Sides, Garvin gets the next moment of glory. But let’s slide out of the line of fire, on the off chance those lifters have got heat det
ectors and somebody who knows how to use them.”

  The two trotted down the rise, to the clump of trees, strange bleached-green growths more like fungi than real woods.

  About twenty-five ‘Raum and a scattering of I&R soldiers waited. Njangu noted Jasith, looking lost and a little scared, Poynton talking to her in low, soothing tones. He also noted that Jasith was firmly clutching a small pistol, a hideout gun one of the ‘Raum had given her.

  At least she wasn’t being a rich idiot and vaporing around.

  On the reverse slope, the enemy marched closer. A dozen men and women came up from hiding, spattered bursts across the right column, ducked away.

  Garvin and another ten came from a nest of low boulders that didn’t look like they could hide anything, fired in turn while the first set fled up the hillside in the cover of a ravine and over the hill to safety.

  The Musth were firing back, but there wasn’t anything to shoot at.

  One of the flits swooped low, hovered.

  Finf Heckmyer put half a belt through an SSW, and the lifter shuddered, slid sideways, and, trailing smoke, limped back to the command ship.

  Garvin, just at the top of the hill, nodded in satisfaction. “ ‘At’s right, boys. Learn how it works the hard way.”

  • • •

  The humans moved in twenty-man groups, keeping in touch by com, occasionally joining up for attacks against the Musth, but moving, always moving.

  The weather was mild, with no more than occasional sheeting rain.

  “Something’s real wrong here,” a troopie observed. “Nobody ever goes sojering in good weather. Where’s the ice? Where’s the snow? Where’s the frigging typhoons?”

  • • •

  A column of warriors patrolled carefully through a long patch of trees. A blast tore the middle of the column apart, and warriors savagely opened up, spraying everything and nothing.

  Finally realizing no return fire was coming, they sheepishly stopped shooting, and aid-givers and officers ran toward the wounded.

  Then the second booby trap went off, less than five meters from the first, decimating the command group and medics.

  Ten ‘Raum stood, pumped five rounds each into the swarm, ran. One wasn’t quick enough and was shot down.

  • • •

  The Musth were learning. An I&R team stalked a fifty-warrior sweep, and was skillfully led into an ambush, with no human survivors.

  Garvin, after surveying the body-laden field, ordered his subordinates to sermonize on what happens when you let yourself think your enemy’s stupider than you.

  • • •

  None of the human groups spent more than a few hours in one place, one eye on the sky, the other on a possible ambush site. They endlessly circled Keffa’s ship, closing for a fast attack on the warriors tracking them, then vanishing into the wilds.

  Little by little, the soldiers were memorizing their fighting ground.

  But so were the Musth.

  • • •

  Keffa felt utter frustration. He had a ship that could nearly blow a planet out of its orbit, but he didn’t have sensors delicate enough to detect one sniper hiding on the hillside.

  He could remain airborne, but how could he hunt his prey?

  He refused to consider admitting withdrawal, returning with a larger, more suitable force.

  A Musth never retreated, after all.

  • • •

  “Try this,” Alikhan suggested.

  Dill looked skeptically at the bit of orange growth, but put it in his mouth, chewed tentatively.

  “Sort of like, oh, a real dead potato,” he said. “But it’s staying down.” He wrote a description in a notebook.

  “Now this.”

  “This” was quite appealing — green with white striations. Dill chewed twice, then his eyes bulged and he stumbled to the nearest bush and vomited. He rinsed his mouth from his canteen, came back.

  “This one’s next,” Alikhan said mercilessly.

  “Gimme a minute.”

  He drank more water, felt his nausea subside.

  “Thus far,” Alikhan said, “we have seven plants we both can eat, four neither of us can stomach, and eleven you can’t tolerate.”

  “What fun I’m having in the name of science,” Dill said.

  “Well, since we are not infantrymen, we must serve in some way.”

  “And what good little crunchies we be. But nobody’s ever gonna give anybody a medal for puking above and beyond the call of duty.”

  Dill scratched his burgeoning beard, which he thought made him look distinguished, but most others thought looked like a wire brush that had lost an engagement with a wildcat.

  “So,” he said, “you being a canny analyst, how’s all this nonsense gonna play out?”

  “Either Keffa will call for reinforcements and destroy us; Keffa will give up and abandon us; Senza will have gotten my message, and decided it’s in his interest to help us; or we shall destroy Keffa. In descending order of probability.

  “I can live with those odds.”

  “Yet another, more likely than the others, is that Keffa will destroy us without assistance.”

  “Wonderful. The dice are loaded, as usual. The best option is being marooned. Best? What did I just say? I wish I could claim bein’ stuporous.” Dill changed the subject. “I wonder why we haven’t seen any critters bigger than my head yet? Especially ones that’ll fit on a grill over a nice fire.”

  “Perhaps there are none. I am not an ecologist.”

  “I surely miss a steak that isn’t prefabbed and dehydrated,” Dill mourned.

  • • •

  That night, a sentry saw movement, woke his sleeping team up. He pulled a grenade, and something twice the size of a Musth, with, as the sentry said, “more legs than God,” made a purring sort of noise, then leapt away.

  “Perhaps,” Alikhan suggested, “someone else is as interested in steak as you, without worrying about the niceties such as a fire.”

  “Shaddup,” Ben Dill said.

  • • •

  Thirty raiders were surprised, pincered between two columns. They shot their way out, but still lost ten.

  “I’m sorry, Garvin,” Jasith apologized. “I just haven’t felt like it.”

  “Who has? Terror doesn’t make me real lustful, either.”

  “Do you think we’ll make it?”

  Garvin hesitated, then said, “Of course.”

  “You’re kind of a crappy liar.”

  “I guess it’s the military life. I used to be a great shill.”

  Jasith looked across the pond their element was camped by, at the vegetation outlined by the setting sun.

  “I don’t think I could ever get used to a world where the colors aren’t what they’re supposed to be.”

  “Sure you could,” Garvin said. “After a couple three you figure out nobody knows what supposed to be really is.”

  Silence for a time, then Jasith said, “I wonder what Loy’s doing now?”

  Hopefully, Garvin thought, being hung by his nonexistent balls by the Musth for associating with a known bandit, but more likely making sure Mellusin Mining is now part of his holdings. But he said nothing.

  • • •

  “I get horny when I’m scared,” Njangu breathed into Poynton’s ear. They were curled together some meters from the rest of their group.

  “Again? No wonder you were a criminal.”

  For some reason he couldn’t figure out, Njangu hadn’t been bothered telling Jo Poynton about his normally hidden past as a junior thug on Waughtal’s Planet, nor even about his abused childhood. Perhaps it was because of Jo’s honesty about her own less-than-stellar past.

  “Of course again,” he purred.

  Two scouts were following a Musth column when a missile came in from nowhere and killed them in mid-transmission. A reaction team found the site, quickly reported, then ran fifty meters and went to cover, as Dr. Froude had asked them to. Another rocket exploded whe
re they’d been.

  “I’ve been expecting this,” Froude told Garvin. “We’ve been too fast, too loose on the com, and they’ve finally been able to track our signals.

  “We’ll have to change policy, and go to limited casts, changing frequencies regularly. Also, move after transmitting if you want to live. If that doesn’t work, we’ll have to start using messengers. Or perhaps semaphore flags.”

  The noose was tightening.

  • • •

  “What’re we like, Monique?”

  “Food enough for, oh, thirty days, more if we can really cut the rats with local edibles. About two units, maybe a little more, per man.”

  A unit of fire was a soldier’s basic ammunition need for one battle — 150 rounds for a basic blaster, 500 for a Squad Support Weapon, two Shrikes per team, and so forth.

  “Not good,” Garvin glummed.

  “Not good at all,” Lir agreed.

  The Musth had, the two scientists figured, a total of five flits on board their ship. Careful observation by a Shrike team produced an interesting fact — when the flits were taking off and landing in the hangar lock, the team’s antiradar detectors went dead. The ship was shutting down its sensors when they landed or launched aircraft. Evidently the Musth didn’t have much faith in their ship’s friend-or-foe recognition abilities.

  The Shrike team crept to within range and waited until nightfall. The flits buzzed around the command ship, and the hangar dock slid open.

  The team fired, and the Shrike slammed into the lock, exploded.

  The blast rocked the great ship, and smoke boiled out. Then, nothing more. The waiting flits were boarded through a secondary lock, and this time the Musth’s tracking radar stayed up.

  Sometime during the night, repair crews put a big, ugly patch over the blackened hole in the skin, and the fight went on.

  • • •

  A day later, with no warning, the command ship launched a dozen long-range missiles in all directions. They exploded against trees, boulders, empty ground.

  None of the teams watching the ship was hit.

  “System failure? Panic? They thought they saw something? I don’t have the froggiest,” Froude said.

  “Insufficient data to theorize,” Heiser said, sounding a bit more professional.