“Si, signora, we are very grateful for freeing us from the Korveni, but there is—”
“Do you know a man called Alfio Jilani? Or his wife Francesca?” Jilani interrupted.
“Si, si, I know of them. There are many Jilanis on the east side.”
“Take me to them!”
“D’accordo, d’accordo. Eh, Milagro!” The man gestured at a boy of ten or eleven, and spoke in rapid Italian. “Milagro will show you.”
“I’ll come with you,” Loco said.
“Keep your comlink in,” Straker called as the two strode away toward the east.
Loco waved to acknowledge.
Straker turned to the man. “What’s your name?”
“I am Teodoro Gagliano, the mayor of Nuovo Paradiso.” He sniffed ruefully. “Nuovo Inferno is what we called it until today—the New Hades. The Korveni were demons. And you are, signore?”
“I’m Derek Straker. These are some of my military unit, Straker’s Breakers. Ms. Jilani convinced us to destroy the Korveni and rescue your people.”
“The Holy Mother be praised for our salvation, Signor Straker, and the people of New Paradise thank you, but we—”
He was interrupted by a fat man who broke through the circle of onlookers accompanied by two muscular, scowling men with cudgels in their hands. “What are you telling these people, Teo? More of your lies?”
Interesting that the man spoke in Earthan rather than Italian, Straker thought. For my benefit, then. Was it Machiavelli who said, “Where there are three people, there are politics”? This guy’s trying to convince me of something—or he’s afraid of offending me.
“I told no lies, Degrasso. Only that the Korveni are demons and to thank Signor Straker here.”
“And did you call yourself the mayor of our fine city?”
“I am the mayor, elected by the people.”
“There was no election, so there is no mayor! I am the capo here, and I’m in charge!”
Gagliano turned to Straker. “Signore, this man is a puppet of the Korveni, a collaborator.”
“I am no such thing!” Degrasso barked. “I only had the people’s welfare in mind. My men and I protected the people against the worst the Korveni did—when I could, you understand, Signor Straker.” He donned a frown like an inept actor. “It was a hard life, but we are grateful to you for freeing us.”
“Hard enough for you to grow fat, Degrasso?”
Straker’s first instinct was to believe Gagliano, not Degrasso, but there might be more to the situation than met the eye. Drastic decisions could wait a day or two—assuming all was well with Gray and her fight with the Mangler.
Straker held up a hand and put a finger to his comlink. “One moment, gentlemen. Straker to Zaxby.”
“Zaxby here.”
“Where are you?”
“Flying above you, providing overwatch.”
“Good,” Straker said. “Do you know how Gray’s doing?”
“She and our flotilla have rendered the Mangler combat-ineffective and are standing by for further orders.”
“Tell her to act as she sees fit. Keep her apprised of our situation here and vice-versa.”
As he was speaking, Gagliano had stepped up to him and was now shaking his sleeve. “Signore, signore.”
Degrasso grabbed the smaller man, but then stopped angrily at Straker’s raised palm. “Let him go,” Straker said. “What is it, Signor Gagliano?”
“The shovelheads. We must secure against the shovelheads, very soon,” Gagliano said earnestly.
Straker left the comlink open, furrowing his brow. “What’s that? What’s a shovelhead?”
“Dangerous animals, Signor Straker,” Degrasso said. “I was coming to warn you. I’m surprised this fool remembered!” He laughed loudly, and his two men did as well, on cue.
“We must put aside our differences for now,” Gagliano said, still holding onto Straker’s sleeve. “The shovelheads are gathering at the river, and soon they will stampede. We are grateful for your coming, of course, but it is unfortunate that you didn’t come tomorrow or the next day, for the Korveni and their weapons were all that stood between us and destruction.”
Straker’s military mind flashed back to the gun emplacements on the wall. The weapons were high-velocity gatling-style slugthrowers of fifteen-millimeter caliber. There’d also been mortars. The combination of the two weapons would be worthless against modern forces like the Breakers. He’d assumed they were to defend against primitives... but then he remembered Jilani denied there were any other sentient peoples here.
“You said shovelheads would stampede... like...” Straker dredged up a memory of historical showvids about the Wild West. “Like a herd of buffalo?”
Degrasso started to answer over Gagliano.
“Let the man speak,” Straker warned and gave the fat fellow such a hard look that he shut up—fuming.
“Far worse than that,” Gagliano said. “They are like a plague of locusts. Every year they gather by the millions and migrate. They are not gentle beasts like cattle. In this season they are maddened—ripping up and eating anything in their path, attacking and also devouring every creature, plant or animal. Only killing untold numbers will turn them—and sometimes not even then. In the third year of our coming they killed five thousand people, and we had to flee from our original settlement by the river to here at the world-wall—climbing high and sealing ourselves in caves.”
Gagliano gestured toward the looming vertical. “The next third-year they destroyed most of our crops, and many of us starved. We buried many families... but we learned. Eventually we cut terraces in the hills to plant and built walls to save some things. But every third-year—this year—they would come in ever-greater waves to tear down the walls and many buildings. Each time we rebuilt... until the Korveni came.”
“And since the Korveni came, we are safe and prosperous!” Degrasso said. “They defend us against the shovelheads, and there is food enough for the children and for those who live in peace.”
“For those who collaborate and submit, you mean.” Gagliano lifted his hand to point at the decomposing bodies on the crosses above. “To those who would be free, that is what they do... or worse.”
“What could be worse than crucifixion?” Straker asked.
“Every year they steal our prettiest girls, our finest boys from their families. We never see them again. Some of our people damn their own souls and drown their newborns rather than see them taken... or they disfigure their children to make them ugly and impossible to sell. The Korveni punish our people for any offense and nail them to the crosses.” The old man made the sign of the cross on his chest—a religious thing, Straker knew.
“The Korveni are gone now. You’ve nothing to fear from them anymore... or from us,” Straker said.
Degrasso ignored Straker and roared at Gagliano, “The Korveni kept us safe from the shovelheads and the other dangers!”
“What other dangers? Freedom? Speaking without fear? Governing ourselves? Growing more food and less Erbaccia?”
Straker stepped between them before Degrasso could argue back. “We destroyed the weapons that defended the settlement, but we’ll protect you now, until you can protect yourselves.”
“Thank you, Your Excellency,” Degrasso said with slimy obsequiousness. “We must have immediate protection from the shovelheads.” He looked past Straker at Gagliano. “You with your philosophical blather! Soon you’d be whining so much about our troubles you’d forget to ask our new benefactors.”
Turning back to Straker he smiled again. “He means well, but he is a tired old fool, not a man of strength and decision like you and me!”
Straker’s grunt was noncommittal. “When will these shovelheads arrive?”
Zaxby spoke on the comlink. “I believe I can answer that question: approximately thirty minutes.”
“Thirty minutes?” Spurred by the answer, Straker turned to jog back toward his parked Jackhammer, leaving the civilians behind. “Shit.
Put me on the widest channel.”
“Done.”
“This is Straker. Loco, get your ass back to your suit, full speed. Hok and mechsuiters to the outer wall, now. Landers will reposition within the perimeter and remain engines-hot for immediate liftoff and fire support. Zaxby, if you can rustle up some more skimmers or armed shuttles it would help.”
“I believe I can solve the problem without a battle, Derek Straker.”
“How’s that?”
“I can lay a small atomic bomb on the advancing herd. That will kill all of them within a one-kilometer radius and probably divert the rest. If not, I can always use a larger device.”
Straker forced himself to seriously consider the outlandish suggestion—nuking a bunch of herd animals? Seemed like overkill, but Zaxby was no fool. If he was suggesting it... “What effect will that have on the civilians here?”
“I predict fewer than one thousand deaths if everyone takes immediate shelter. They’ll have to rebuild many structures, and will need medical support to treat the radiation sickness, but—”
“Forget it. We’re not killing a thousand people and poisoning the land just to take the easy way out.”
“Fewer than one thousand deaths.”
“No,” Straker insisted.
“I could use an antimatter device, though our stocks are low. There is little persistent radiation with such an explosion, though the direct death toll and blast damage would be similar.”
Straker considered. “No. We’ll handle this the old-fashioned way.”
“Is there an old-fashioned way to battle millions of crazed omnivorous herd animals bent on eating you?”
“Not with nukes, I’ll tell you that.”
Zaxby indulged in sarcasm. “Perhaps with swords and spears? Bows and arrows? The farmers could take up their pitchforks.”
“Not that old-fashioned. Force-cannon and blasters will do fine.”
“By my calculations you’ll run short of ammo long before you kill enough shovelheads. Pity that you destroyed all the mortars and autocannon so prematurely.”
“Zaxby, shitcan the critique and start helping. Get Gray to send whatever she can inside. Armed shuttles, pinnaces, anything that flies and shoots.”
“I’ve done so already,” he said. “Also, my skimmers will transit via underspace and emerge high above us, where the atmosphere is very thin. They’ll use their weaponry as soon as they are able, but I fear all reinforcements will be too late.”
“How late?” Straker demanded.
“At least an hour.”
“We’ll hold until then.”
“That would be wise, considering the alternative... but it is unlikely.”
“We’ll hold!”
By this time Straker was back in his mechsuit and in position at the center of the curving wall, facing outward. Again he cursed himself for blowing holes in the barrier and destroying all the Korveni weaponry. It was a natural mistake, but a mistake nonetheless.
“Mechsuiters, stand in the holes. You are the gun emplacements now. When the shovelheads come, make your shots count. Conserve ammo! Zaxby says we’ll probably run low before we drive them off.”
The Jackhammers moved up to take position behind the destroyed weapons pits. Hok loped up and stood behind the chest-high wall between the mechsuiters, blasters aiming over it.
“Major 24, have your men salvage and see if they can get any of the Korveni crew-served weapons operational.”
“Roger wilco, sir!” Five minutes later, the Hok came up with one operational 100mm mortar and a surprising number of undamaged shells for it.
Behind the line, twelve landers rested, ready to pop up into the air and use their point-defense lasers. Above the battlefield, Zaxby’s skimmer cruised.
“Boss, look!” Loco cued Straker’s HUD downward and back.
From behind, Straker observed lines of citizens, mostly able-bodied men, trudging out to the wall in their thousands. They carried a mix of weapons and tools, everything from shovels and pitchforks, spears and crossbows up to captured Korveni blasters. Mayor Gagliano led the nearest line and waved at Straker’s mechsuit.
“Mayor Gagliano,” Straker said over his external loudspeaker. “Your people should withdraw to the caves. If we can’t hold, you’ll be overrun.”
“The women and children—and the cowards like Degrasso—are going to the caves. We here are willing to die for our people if we must, Generale. We cannot stand idly by.” The old man yelled orders in rapid-fire Italian, and his troops spread out.
“Shit,” Straker said conversationally to Loco after turning off the loudspeaker. “If we can’t hold...”
“We’re gonna feel terrible about leaving these poor bastards to be trampled when we withdraw to the next wall.”
“Right.” Straker gauged the distance to the wall behind, a wall without fixed weapon emplacements—but also without holes or damage. It stood a full kilometer back, and was much smaller, perhaps half the perimeter of the larger one. He addressed Gagliano again. “Mayor Gagliano, will you take my orders?”
“Anything, mio Generale.”
“Give your modern firearms to your fittest people or your fastest runners and leave them here. They will fight with us and withdraw with us when the time comes. Take the rest back to the second wall. It’s a better wall—a shorter wall and easier to defend. You’ll be needed there. Otherwise, when we pull back, all your people will die—because we will pull back—maybe more than once.”
Gagliano seemed ready to protest, but then he nodded. “Si, mio Generale. We will do as you say.” After some confusion, most of the citizens trudged back toward the second wall.
“Boss...”
Straker turned his attention back to the front and took in a sight that made him thankful he was in a mechsuit. The clouds of dust that had been approaching now reached the line of thin bushes and trees that marked the rough delineation with the farm fields, about five kilometers off. If only there’d been time to flood them... but maybe...
“Hok, fire a few blaster shots and get the crops burning again,” he ordered. Soon, patches of fire sprung up.
Beyond, he zoomed his optics in on the approaching herd of shovelheads. Isolated and stabilized by his HUD display, he was able to examine one. His first impression was of a striped dinosaur or a rhinoceros. A real animal with four legs, thick skin and beady eyes, marked like a zebra with vertical stripes of light and dark gray. Just under three meters at the shoulder, it looked to mass five to ten tons, with a neckless body shaped like a warthog’s.
The source of its name was obvious, for the thing’s head was flattened and a ridge of solid bone or horn material protruded from above its four nostrils, running backward in a wedge to a point over and behind its low-set eyes. Straker could easily see the animal digging up the soil like a pig used its snout, but on a much larger scale... or simply using the thick slab of horn to batter its foes like a bighorn ram.
Below the plate of horn it had tusks like a warthog and a mouthful of sharp pointed teeth—a land-going shark, an eating machine. Nasty customer. Straker wondered if, like sharks, they would eat their own dead—or attack their own wounded.
But even such an animal would be nothing to worry about for powered armor—except for its numbers. Straker accessed Zaxby’s feed and tried to get an estimate of the herd size. He zoomed out to encompass five kilometers and saw no end.
Ten.
Twenty.
Forty.
When his field of view encompassed a diameter of fifty kilometers he began seeing the edge of the herd. Most of it was not dense or thick, not shoulder-to-shoulder the way those approaching were, and they tended to cluster at the river—where it became apparent that they were literally drinking it dry, as after a certain point downstream there was nothing but mud.
In fact, it appeared the water, flowing from the west—or the left as Straker faced them—was one of the migration factors. The herd was moving generally westward or upriver—probab
ly an instinct to reach more water and find more food after stripping the landscape bare.
As the locals said, the shovelheads tended to attack anything they noticed in a mass. The approaching ones were ripping up the sparse trees and bushes and eating them even as they moved. Above them carrion creatures flew—vultures or their ecological analogues. The birds hoped to reap a feast.
His HUD calculated there were more than fifty million shovelheads in this herd alone.
Straker wondered if there was any chance at all of pulling back and out of the way—but to do so would be to lose every structure in the settlement—every store, every barn, every mill, every machine, every cow and sheep and chicken that wasn’t brought into the caves.
When they reached the edge of the burning fields, the shovelheads barely paused. A few in the front turned aside, but they were either shoved back into line or trampled under by the rest.
The locals began firing their weapons until Straker called for them to cease. “Wait for my order and we’ll hit them all at once!” he told them, and reinforced his instructions on his comlink. Maybe if he could stun the herd hard enough, they’d change direction. They must have some rudimentary sense of self-preservation, if only to keep them from running off cliffs.
Or maybe not. Maybe it made better ecological sense for them to do nothing but mindlessly eat and breed and die.
“Get that mortar working,” Straker said, and the Hok team immediately began dropping bombs down the tube with metronomic timing and efficiency. Being in battlesuits, they had no need to duck out of the way of the muzzle blast, so they sent bombs into the air at a rate of two a second.
The explosions fell at first in front of the advancing line, and then inside it. Burst after burst cut down several beasts at a time, but otherwise, the herd ignored it.
At a range of one thousand meters Straker considered ordering the Jackhammers to fire, but held off. They simply didn’t have the ammo or fuel to kill millions of shovelheads. The initial volley had to be a good one, and must be combined with the Hok blasters in hopes of getting the herd to turn.
At six hundred meters he said, “Get ready. Landers lift off. Zaxby, fire when we do. Make every shot count. Turn these porkers into hamburger.”
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