Beyond the ships, the Slug skirmish line approached the opposite bank.
Ord hardly needed his binoculars. The skirmish line was so close that individual Slugs were distinguishable to the naked eye.
A Slug warrior looks like a puke-green zucchini nearly six feet long, tip-to-tail. A warrior has no eyes, just white patches along its anterior taper that sense infrared light. A warrior doesn’t have permanent appendages, either, just a pseudopod that toothpastes out of a hole in its body armor, which the warrior wraps around its rifle. Slug body armor is black, shiny, and segmented, and an M-40 round cuts it like cheese.
Slugs crossing open ground look just like oversized garden pests. When they’re scrunched up and oozing, the anterior crest of their armor stands less than five feet tall, and they move as fast as double-timing infantry.
Howard said, “We’ve never seen how It reacts to water.”
A Casuni woman pointed back at the Slugs as she ran away, and screamed, “The Devil! The Devil!”
Howard turned, hands-on-hips, and watched her run. “She didn’t say, ‘What’s that?’ She seemed to know.”
“Goddammit, Howard! Load your weapon!”
The front rank of Slugs reached the water’s edge.
Ranks of half a dozen oozed forward, carrying logs wrapped by their snaky pseudopods, like a rowing team carrying a scull to the water. Each half dozen dropped its log in the water, then the next rank and log oozed along the first, extending a thousand bridges, each one log wide, across the river in minutes. The next rank followed, then the next.
The Heavy volleys stopped, and the only sounds were the crackle of flame, distant human screams, and the splash of water and creak of logs.
I said to Ord, “They’ve lifted the barrage.”
Jude asked, “Now?”
Howard cocked his rifle. “Wait.”
Ord had our ’Bots loaded, with the two carrying explosives and ammunition thirty yards behind us, and the two carrying inert equipment hunkered down in front of us like mobile pillboxes. They would move when we moved, screening us from Slug fire.
I knelt behind the ’Bot that sheltered Jude and me, and sighted on the water’s edge, a hundred yards away. Behind their ’Bot, so did Ord and Howard.
Jude lay alongside me, his rifle at his shoulder.
I turned my head toward him. “Just like the Sergeant Major taught you on the Simulator. Aim. Breathe. Squeeze. Okay?”
He nodded. “But—why don’t we just run?”
“We can’t outrun them forever. We fight when we can take out the most of them with the least risk. When I say fall back, you fall back with me. Keep your head down, and keep the ’Bot between you and the Slugs. Reload on the run. Howard and the Sergeant Major will cover us, then we’ll stop and cover them. You keep doing that until I tell you to do something else. If I don’t tell you, do exactly what the Sergeant Major says.”
“Why wouldn’t you tell— Oh.”
A warrior rank dropped a log that touched the river’s near bank, in front of us, then another bridge was completed, and another.
I asked Ord, “Did you clock ’em?”
“I calculate the water crossing slowed them about two miles per hour, Sir. They’ve always been full of surprises.”
They were ten feet from shore, now, all across their advancing front.
Bang.
Jude fired and hit nothing.
I said, “Wait till the first one hits land. Then we’ll back ’em up on their logs.”
“Jason, I’m scared.”
“Me too.”
Ord said, “I have a target.” His rifle popped, and a warrior splashed dead on the river bank’s mud.
Zeeeee.
I flinched at the sound of the first mag rifle round I’d heard in years.
But not the last. For the next three minutes I fired, moved, reloaded, and fired, over and over. A half dozen rounds grazed my armor without effect.
Jude didn’t stay behind the ’Bot, as he was told, and took a round full on his chestplate. The blow’s force knocked him onto his back, and I dove toward him, screaming.
He came up on one knee, coughing and rubbing the dent in his chestplate. “Pug! That stung!”
We retreated fifty yards, while the Slugs we killed became hurdles that slowed the warrior ranks behind them. Then the rear ranks surged over the corpses. The four of us lay, panting, behind the two Cargo’Bots. The remaining Slugs, still too many to count, pressed forward, and their rounds thunked as they struck the ’Bots’ carapaces.
I told Ord, “Time to break contact.” I turned to Jude and pointed upslope. Black smoke from the burning tents oozed across the ground like a great wall. “When we get up this time, run till we’re all obscured in that smoke.”
Jude said, “But Slugs can see in the dark.”
Howard said, “Not exactly. Air that’s as warm as bodies moving through it will make it harder for those warriors to see us.”
I looked one more time at Jude, Ord, and Howard. “Ready?”
Jude grabbed my arm. “But, Jason, what about them?”
He pointed to our left. Fifty yards away was The Block.
Its stage was empty. The Auctioneers had fled moments after the crowd. But a hundred slaves and slaves-to-be remained chained to the iron rings that hung from the stage. Slug rounds cracked against the stone, powdering small clouds into the air.
A half dozen slaves already lay still and bloody. The rest screamed, clawed the ground trying to dig holes to hide in, or tore at their chains. The slight girl with the baby and the blue hair comb bled at the ankles as she struggled to tear free of her leg shackles.
If we turned and ran from the Slugs now, we would make it to the smoke’s safety with fifty yards to spare, easy. But the Slugs would slaughter the slaves. If we detoured to help the slaves, we would likely be overrun—and killed—ourselves.
I turned to Ord. “We can’t leave them, Sergeant Major.”
Ord was already working the combination on a Plasteel balanced on a ’Bot’s back. “Thermite sticks should cut those chains, Sir.”
I pointed up the hill and told Howard, “You take Jude up there. Ord and I will rejoin you after we get those people loose.”
Jude said, “No way. I stay with you.”
Howard shook his head at me. “You’ll need covering fire.”
I looked downslope, where the Slug wave rolled on toward us, and blinked. As a soldier, it was Howard’s privilege to spend his life, and my duty to order him to do so. But Jude was no more a combatant than those screaming, bleeding people trapped in chains. He was a child. My child.
Jude said, “Jason, I just want to do the right thing.”
There wasn’t time to debate. And he was right. I pointed at The Block. “Okay. Keep down, behind the ’Bots.”
Ord tossed me a bound pack of Thermite sticks as we ran to The Block. Now the Slugs were close enough and thick enough that I thumbed my rifle to full automatic, and fired as we ran without fear that any shots would miss.
As we approached, the slaves scrabbled back away from us, throwing up their hands, wide eyed, and pleading.
With our visors down, in armor the like of which no Clansman of Bren had ever seen, we must have looked like demons to the slaves. Bren firearms were single shot, but our rifles were spitting seven hundred rounds per minute, like dragon fire. And at our sides crawled iron spiders as big as young duckbills.
No wonder we terrified the people we were trying to save.
I dodged out from behind the ’Bot that sheltered Ord and me, molded a Thermite stick around the first manacle I saw that had an animate foot in it, jammed an insulation pad under the manacle to shield the foot from the heat and flash. I yanked the starter ribbon.
Whoosh.
A red, forty-five-hundred-degree-Fahrenheit flash severed the manacle. I brushed the red-hot iron away with my gauntlet, pushed the man to his feet, and pointed toward the smoke. “Run!”
Ord had cut three slaves loose in the time
it took me to free one.
He knelt beside me, firing, and shouted, “Sir, it’s taking too long!”
I said, “Retask the ’Bots. Have ’em break chains with their manipulators.”
Ord nodded, and moved out.
Howard and Jude saw what Ord was doing and Howard retasked their ’Bot, too.
I glanced up the hill and counted twenty freed slaves, stumbling and crawling for their lives. Farther up the slope, just in front of the smoke screen thrown by the burning of The Great Fair, was the only other Bren who had not fled the meadow in panic.
On a prancing, snow-white duckbill sat the huge, jewel-armored Casuni who had allowed Bassin to win the bid for us. He pressed a brass spyglass to one eye, watching the battle.
The Slug front line was thirty yards away, now.
A ’Bot snapped the last chain and freed the last slave on the for-sale side of the block.
Three slaves, four counting the young girl’s baby, remained imprisoned in the “sold” compound. I ran to them, and wrapped the first Thermite stick.
Ord knelt beside me again. “Sir, we’re about to be overrun.”
“Tell Howard and Jude to fall back.”
“I did, Sir. Colonel Hibble said he outranked me. Jude told me to pug myself.”
A Slug warrior leapt across the ’Bot that formed our final barrier, six feet from us. Ord shot him, point blank, then stood and hosed down a half dozen more, nearly as close.
The girl with the baby was the last chained slave. I knelt alongside her as she trembled in the dirt, her eyes as wide and white as hard-boiled eggs. Crimson stained her dress hem, where her ankle had bled as she tried to free herself from her chains.
I wiped blood off her chain, so the Thermite stick wouldn’t slip, then said to her, “Look away when I pull the ribbon, and don’t touch the manacle. I’ll pull it off. Then run up the hill and don’t stop.”
She stared at me.
I popped my visor, and made my speech again.
She nodded, pulled her crying infant to her chest, looked over my shoulder and screamed.
I spun, slapped a Slug warrior off my back, then clubbed him with my M-40, barrel first.
A GI can always take one Slug, hand-to-pseudopod. But he can’t take fifty.
I burned the girl’s leg iron, helped her to her feet, and shoved her toward the smoke screen.
Then I turned back to the fight.
Howard had retasked a ’Bot, so it flailed its manipulators like a Lawn’Bot, slicing through a Slug every second. Each Slug’s armor split, and green slop exploded onto Howard’s and Jude’s red Eternads. The two of them looked like Christmas elves from hell.
Ord stood literally knee-deep in dead Slug warriors, while he blazed away with a pistol, his own 1911-model .45 automatic, in one hand. His torso shook as he fired the M-40 he held in his other hand. He had fixed a bayonet to the rifle, and green slug blood dripped from it.
Beyond Ord and Jude and Howard, the ground was black with advancing Slugs. There was no outrunning the wave now.
The smells of burning canvas and flesh, and of cordite, swirled through my open visor. The incessant rattle of our weapons punctuated the unending sigh of thousands of Slug mag rail rifles.
I didn’t review my life, or think that we saved some slaves, or even think that my friends, and my godson, would die alongside me within two minutes.
What I thought of were all those oil paintings of last stands, in all those military museums, like Custer at Little Big Horn, or Chelmsford at Isandlwhana. The central figure always stood alone, surrounded, blazing or slashing away at his enemy, some flag flapping behind him, before he and all the troops around him got killed. They didn’t have Cam’Bots in those days, so who told the artist what the scene looked like at the end?
Something behind me struck my shoulder and knocked me face-down in the bloody meadow. That didn’t conform to the portrait model.
Twenty-Nine
I turned my head, and saw, six inches from my face, a snow-white, clawed foot as big as my torso.
I rolled onto my back, aiming my rifle, and stared up at the jewel-armored Casuni who had spyglassed our battle, looming from on top of his mount.
The man held a pistol in each hand and his reins in his teeth. His black hair and beard swelled around the edges of a crested gold helmet with a metal nosepiece, and he wore the showy armor he had on at the Slave auction.
Blam. Blam.
The big man’s pistols flashed yellow, and two Slugs’ anterior armor exploded. The white duckbill trampled three more, while its rider holstered his two spent pistols at his waist. Then he reared his mount back, so it balanced for a heartbeat on its tail, and the huge animal pummeled two more Slug warriors with its hind feet, like a boxing kangaroo.
I scrambled to my knees, and sprayed a half dozen Slugs.
The cavalryman’s intervention had opened a tiny hurricane eye around us four Earthlings, our ’Bots, and himself.
He leaned down, and extended me a gauntleted hand. “Up with you! Be quick!” He tossed his head toward the massing Slugs, and grinned. “God defends the virtuous only while the devil rests.”
I looked around. Three more riders had already scooped up Ord, Jude, and Howard, who sat behind them on their duckbills.
Ord already had the four ’Bots quick-marching uphill.
I took the big man’s arm, and he swung me—Eternads, rifle, ammo, and all—up onto his saddle behind him like I was a kindergartner.
A Slug round glanced off his helmet, and he snorted. He reined his mount so it turned and faced the Slug that had fired the shot, then cross-drew the two pistols holstered across his breastplate.
As his duckbill reared, the pistols kicked in his huge hands, the armor of the Slug that had fired at him split like a peeled banana, and the bullet killed a following Slug as well. The other shot dropped a third Slug. Then he holstered the spent, smoking single-shot pistols, drew his sword, and slashed a warrior in half as though its armor was paper.
The man frowned. “I would have expected the devil to provide better sport.”
Then he turned, and we galloped until we crossed into the smoke and left the Slugs behind.
Five minutes later, we caught up to within a hundred yards of the ragged rear of the fleeing crowds. The big man glanced over his shoulder at the empty countryside we had opened between us and The Fair’s wreckage, then reined in his mount.
From our left, the duckbills that carried Ord, Jude, and Howard approached and slowed to our pace. Our ’Bots scurried in their wake.
We halted, and the man swung me down. Then he dismounted and led his frothed and panting duckbill by its reins.
A straggler scurried alongside us, his arms filled with blankets and crockery. He bowed as he passed. “M’Lord.”
The big man ignored him.
I said to the big man, “Thank you.”
“What?” He held his reins in hands clasped behind his back, as we walked side by side.
“You risked your life to save us.”
“Save you? I paid good money for that girl! Then you cut her loose!” He shook his head. “A hundred pissed away!”
I turned to him, and my jaw dropped.
He stared, too, then a grin spread out from the middle of his beard, and he threw his head back. He slapped my shoulder so hard I stumbled, then roared a laugh. “You’re gullible, for a half-Marini!”
We walked on, as he plucked huge cartridges from a bandolier, and reloaded each of his four single-shot pistols. Then he reached for the M-40 I had slung across my shoulder, and poked it with a finger as thick as a sausage. “Gullible, but a clever salesman. These guns that talk like women would make a Tassini wet himself. You know where I could buy a few, quietly?”
“How few?”
“A shipload.”
“Sure. Factory-direct, and cheap. But you won’t believe the freight.”
He shook his head, and rumbled a chuckle. “You gun runners always play the virgin
. We’ll talk again.”
The others joined us. The big man pointed at the ’Bots, as they trundled along beside us. “Do those eat much?”
I said, “You have questions. So do we. But the devil, as you call the black worms, will be back on our tail as soon as those warriors regroup.” I jerked a thumb back toward the smoke plume that rose behind us. “They’ll catch up to you before your defenses are prepared. You need to select terrain and dig in.”
He snorted. “Holes are for the crap of snakes, and for the Marini who grow from crap. No offense.”
I pointed at the refugee throngs in front of us. “If you don’t dig in, the worms will overrun those civilians.”
“So? They’re Marini and Tassini. But, God willing, there will always be more fighting. I’ll regroup my Army.”
He swung up onto his white charger, then pointed at us and said to his men, “See no harm comes to these half-breeds. Or their weapons.”
“Where should we take them, Casus?”
“Where they want to go. But if they choose to go back to the Fisheaters, you don’t help them.” He spurred his mount, and galloped off, his duckbill spewing a storm of dirt clods.
Casus? Blackbeard had mentioned “Casus.” I stood with hands on hips and watched him ride off.
Jude walked up alongside me, adjusting his M-40’s sling to match mine. Ord had said Jude was a quick study. Munchkin hadn’t raised her boy to be a soldier. Neither had my mom, but suddenly and unexpectedly I had become one. Now events had made my godson a soldier, too.
Jude asked, “Who’s that guy?”
“Casus. He roasts poachers alive. He attacks the devil incarnate on a white charger, while all about him flee in terror. And he doesn’t care flea snot for any Clan on this planet but his own. The Casuni must be named for his bloodline.”
“He’s, like, King?”
“A king who can shoot.”
Ord stepped alongside us, reached over and tucked in the flapping tail of Jude’s sling. “The equipment survived. The rest of us made it through with bumps and bruises. You, Sir?”
“Same.”
“Sir, I took the liberty of retasking Jeeb to overfly the area, to assess damage and enemy dispositions.”
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