by David Drake
Buffeting made all objects within the Swift rattle, adding considerable noise to the wind-roar through the thick hull. All personnel were in their bunks, wearing body armor and festooned with weapons and equipment.
Ned was dry-mouthed. He’d never before had this long to expect certain combat.
“Lissea, the indigs’ll be concentrated on the downed ship,” Herne Lordling said. His helmet gave him the ability to enter the command net rather than simply listen to Channel 1 traffic, the way other personnel did. “We shouldn’t land within fifty klicks of them. Let the fools get themselves out of their jam. Over.”
Ned suspected Lordling spoke for most of the complement. The Swift wasn’t crewed by Good Samaritans, and this looked like a dicey business at best. The crewmen of the vessel that had either crashed or foolishly landed on Buin—it wasn’t clear which—were in desperate straits, but that wasn’t a problem the Warsons, for example, felt they were being paid to solve.
Ned was green enough, he supposed—soft enough—to be willing to help. He just didn’t see there was a thing in hell he could do.
“Westerbeke,” snapped Lissea’s voice, “land us as planned if the site is clear. Lordling, you have your orders.”
“All personnel prepare for landing,” Westerbeke ordered. The pilot sounded cool, almost bored.
The boom of the jets segued into a ringing blammm! as Westerbeke or the ship’s AI doubled the number of lit nozzles and shifted the direction of thrust. Flat clamps held Ned to his bunk when inertia tried to shift him first forward, then up.
Reflected exhaust hammered the Swift, a warning that the vessel was within meters of the ground. The touchdown itself was accompanied by a series of raps on the lower hull.
Ned’s first thought was that the Buinites were already attacking. Tadziki, who was importing visuals from the navigational console to his visor, said, “Loose gravel, boys. It’s all right.”
The main hatch began to open an instant before the jets shut off and the couch clamps released. Mercenaries swung from their bunks with a long crash of boots against the decking. The ramp was only halfway down when Herne Lordling’s four-man team pounded across it and leaped to the ground. The second team was a stride behind them; Ned and Lissea were half of the third.
It must have rained recently. The brush was alive with yellow, white, and orange flowers which almost hid the cooler-colored foliage that Gresham’s holograms had led Ned to expect. Between bushes scattered at several-meter intervals, the stony soil had a white crust that could be either salt or lichen.
The Swift’s external cargo blisters were already open. The Warson brothers had lifted out one of the jeeps and were reaching for the other. Ned didn’t recall having ever before seen such a casual expression of strength.
He unlocked the fan nacelles of the first jeep and levered them up into operating position. Somebody fired from the other side of the vessel. The plasma discharges sizzled through the commo helmet an instant before the sonic hiss-crack!
Crewmen with bundles of poles, wire, and directional mines staggered through the brush under guard of their fellows with weapons ready. Three men remained aboard the Swift: Westerbeke and Petit, at the navigational and engine-room consoles respectively, and Tadziki—against his will—to take charge of the vessel if things went badly wrong. The adjutant stood in the center of the main hatchway with a 2-cm powergun ready.
The Swift’s upper hull was the best vantage point for a kilometer in any direction. The two-man crew who’d set up the tribarrel there cried out. They pointed over the jeeps toward vegetation lining an underground watercourse; then cut a long burst loose. Cyan bolts blew stems upward in a haze of soapy black flames.
Lissea lurched into the jeep with the device she’d built in the Swift’s maintenance shop. The electronics chassis mounted three separate lenses on the front, with a shoulder stock and a clumsy-looking handgrip underneath. From the way Lissea struggled, the apparatus must weigh twenty kilos.
“Are you ready?” Lissea shouted as Ned dropped into the seat beside her. She glanced around at the other jeep. “Is everybody ready?”
“Let’s get ’em,” Deke Warson said with his hands on the driver’s yoke. His brother lifted the muzzle of his 2-cm powergun slightly. He’d slung an identical weapon across his chest. This wouldn’t be a good time to have to clear a jam.
Three Buinites ran from the shelter of a flat-topped tree half a kilometer away. A merc guarding the wiring party fired and spun the middle indig. The remaining pair dropped flat, then rose again together. A storm of cyan bolts devoured them before they could release the stones their arms were cocked to throw.
“Get a move on, Slade!” Lissea shouted, though the only delay had been that of the fans accelerating the loaded jeep after Ned shoved his controls forward.
By plan, Ned’s jeep—Lissea’s jeep—was to lead. Ned was pretty sure that the actual reason he was a nose ahead of the Warsons as they raced toward the knoll just within the gap in the new-strung wire was that the brothers and their equipment were that much heavier than the load Ned’s vehicle had to carry.
The crews had laid a conductive net as fine as spider silk between posts at hundred-meter intervals. The wires weren’t so much material presence as scatterings of sunlight. They sagged at some points and were twisted around brush.
With luck, the net would provide a stable base for the minutes Lissea needed to carry out her plans.
The rocky knoll was the only high ground—three meters above its surroundings, putting it above the treetops—in the vicinity. The tribarrel on the ship fired a long planned burst, blasting the site clear of vegetation. Ned steered by memory, because he wouldn’t be able to see the rise until it was right on top of him.
Somewhere a Buinite hit the net. Electricity from the nuclear batteries in the nearest post coursed through the creature in a long, drawn-out thunderclap. Cross-wires were insulated from one another, guaranteeing a current path whether or not the victim was grounded.
A dozen more Buinites reprised their dead fellow’s actions within the next ten seconds. None of the victims screamed.
The roots of bushes held soil together, forming squat plateaus like the drums carnivores perch on in a circus act. Ned skidded between a pair of the short columns. He wasn’t driving a tank, though with a load like this the little jeep handled as sluggishly as a tank did. He had to go around things, not over them, and there wasn’t any protection for when—
A submachine gun and three or four 2-cm weapons opened up. They were a good distance away and hidden by the brush. Somebody shouted.
“Up here!” Lissea called, but Ned was already steering to hit the rise bow-on. If he tried to climb the knoll at a slant, the loaded jeep might turn turtle. Ash and bits of charred brush wood sprayed from beneath the skirts, but the plasma-lit fires were barely smoldering.
Ned halted, spinning the jeep to put its bow inward again. The braking force threw them against the seatbacks rather than forward toward the windscreen. He unslung his submachine gun and glanced to the right, toward where the commotion was occurring.
The Buinites had rolled a mass of brush into a fascine four meters in diameter and twenty meters across. The crude construction rocked across the landscape like a bad clockwork toy. Powergun bolts lit the face of it, shattering stems without penetrating.
When green, the local vegetation didn’t burn hot enough to sustain combustion. Veils of dirty smoke swathed the fascine, but the autochthones protected behind it continued to advance the cylinder unhindered.
Ten Buinites trotted toward the knoll. Deke and Toll Warson opened fire from beside Ned and Lissea. Their single aimed shots cracked as quickly as those of an automatic weapon.
“Don’t shoot, you bastards!” Lissea screamed.
Autochthones spun in cyan flashes. The survivors dropped to cover.
A Buinite jumped upright. He was a hundred meters away. Lissea’s device hummed, bathing the autochthone and a one-hundred-twenty-degre
e swath of the landscape in pulsing light.
The creature’s whole body snapped forward like the arm of a ballista. The Warsons fired together. The autochthone’s head and upper thorax gouted blood and fierce blue light, disintegrating under twin megajoule impacts.
“Don’t—” Lissea said as she thumbed a dial to a higher setting. Three more Buinites stood, arched, and blew apart as the device in the captain’s arms hummed uselessly. The last of the creatures died with four bolts from Ned’s submachine gun flashing across the gray chest.
All the Buinites were down, but more rushed from concealment. They’d reacted instantly to the Swift’s arrival. Their speed and organization was remarkable, even granting the previous shipwreck had concentrated them only a klick away.
Lissea adjusted the frequency of her device again. The Warsons waited, and Ned waited. Heat waves trembled above the iridium barrels of their powerguns.
The Buinite fascine staggered under the impact of four rocket shells from the Racontid’s launcher. The cylinder, brush bound with branches, ruptured and spread like a jellyfish cast onto hot sand.
Powergun bolts released their energy on the first solid object they intersected. They could only claw the outside of the fascine. Raff had adjusted the fusing to burst the warheads of his projectile weapon a tenth of a second after impact. The charges went off deep inside the tight-wrapped brushwood, ripping it apart from within.
There were at least forty autochthones behind the fascine, protected by the cylinder’s bulk as they pushed it toward the vessel. Crumpled, the loosened pile still provided cover from ground level, but the men atop the Swift had a better angle.
The tribarrel ripped a bloody swath through the Buinites. As survivors rose to scamper away, individual marksmen knocked them down with stark flashes.
An autochthone threw a rock more than one hundred fifty meters to the knoll. The missile thumped down in a cloud of ash between the two jeeps.
Then a group of a dozen or so approached by short rushes, two or three moving at a time. As each team lurched forward, occasionally dabbing their hands down as they moved, the rest crouched and waited. The Buinites were obviously preparing to loose a shower of stones together while the gunmen focused on the party making the rush.
A Buinite cocked his arm back.
“Next one’s mine, ma’am!” Deke Warson cried.
Lissea triggered her device on the new setting. The Buinite preparing to throw and his crouching fellows all collapsed limply as if shot through the brain stem. The three running autochthones weren’t affected. They hunched as they scampered, so they hadn’t been looking in the direction of the device.
Lissea held her finger down. The runners flopped to cover, peered upward, and sprawled mindlessly in turn.
“Go!” Lissea ordered as Ned shifted power to his fans.
“Yee-ha!” Deke Warson cried as he did the same, guiding the yoke with his knees while he kept the powergun’s shimmering muzzle aimed toward the fallen Buinites. He’d have to take the controls normally in a moment . . . or maybe he wouldn’t—the Warsons were good, everybody aboard the Swift was good, incredibly good at what they did.
By itself, that would just have increased the cost the autochthones incurred when they—crushed, buried, destroyed—the Swift. Lissea’s nerve scrambler emitted a pattern of light on the critical frequency on which the Buinites’ central nervous system operated.
The scrambler’s broad-angle effect would not be enough to stop such dedicated creatures either. In a short time, they would find a way to overcome it.
The jeeps bumped awkwardly across the remainder of the knoll, spitting out bits of charred brush. The downslope gave the little vehicles a gravity boost. Ned’s controls felt lively for the first time since they’d gotten the jeep operating this morning.
The wiring crew had left a gap two meters wide in front of the knoll. Harlow stood behind the self-setting post at one side of it, looking outward.
A Buinite who wasn’t part of the previous squads rose from cover with a rock in his hand. Lissea swung her heavy scrambler toward him.
Toll Warson’s bolt blew the autochthone’s arm off. The limb, still gripping its fistful of basalt, spun in one direction while the torso contra-rotated more slowly in the other. A splash of greenish, copper-based blood dissipated in the air between them.
“We’ve got enough down now,” Lissea muttered to Ned. “If they’ll stay down.”
“So far, so good,” Ned said as he lunged back. He used his weight as well as the nacelle angle to help the jeep clear a jut of harder rock running unexpectedly above the scree to either side.
“It took me three tries to get the frequency!” Lissea said. “A frequency. It may not give us ten minutes; they may be hopping up right when we get to them!”
“Then we’ll put them down again, won’t we?” Ned said, guiding the jeep around the stump of a tree, blown apart in smoldering needles where a plasma bolt had struck it. The first of the catatonic autochthones lay just beyond. The others of the creature’s? family?—sprawled back over a distance of fifty meters.
“Jump!” Ned ordered as he slowed. “I’ll take the other end!”
They hadn’t discussed procedures at this stage, because they hadn’t known how the comatose victims would be arrayed. Lissea didn’t argue: Ned was right, Ned was driving, and anyway, there was no time to argue.
She rolled out of the vehicle, dropping the scrambler onto the seat as she left it. She managed to keep her feet despite the jeep’s forward motion.
Ned accelerated again toward the middle of the straggling line.
Two more fascines rolled toward the Swift from opposite sides of the perimeter. The rocket gun hammered again. Raff was beside the tribarrel on top of the vessel now, so that he could swing his rocket gun in any direction.
The mortar, set up near the Swift’s ramp, fired a ranging shot. Using the high-angle weapon hadn’t been part of the plan, but the crew hadn’t expected the autochthones to concentrate and to deploy siege equipment so quickly. Pretechnological, hell! If the Buinites were hunter-gatherers, it was because they wanted to be hunter-gatherers.
And the Swift would leave them to run their planet the way they wanted to; but first the crew needed water and a break, and that meant discussions with the Buinites on the terms that the Buinites understood.
Two mortar shells burst with pops rather than bangs, ejecting submunitions to cover a wider area than individual blasts could do.
A moment later, the bomblets detonated with a sound like the snarl of a huge cat. If Tadziki had placed his rounds correctly, the autochthones behind one or both the fascines were now flayed corpses.
Killing them wasn’t enough unless every male autochthone on the planet could be killed. Killing and the nerve scrambler were only the preliminary parts of Captain Doormann’s plan. Lissea was just as good at her job as the men she commanded were at theirs.
Ned stopped the jeep by venting the plenum chamber while the fans continued to run. He jumped out, leaving the vehicle howling. Shutting down would save power, but battery life wasn’t likely to be a problem. Ned might not have a lot of time to spin the fans up to operating speed when he wanted to leave.
He wanted to leave now, but he had a job to do.
The submachine gun banged against his breastplate. He ignored it: the Warsons were providing cover. Ned drew the knife from the sheath outside his right boot and knelt beside a Buinite.
The creature lay on its back. Its mouth gaped. Oils blasted from the vegetation by powergun bolts had a strong, spicy odor. Perhaps that was why Ned’s eyes started to water.
The Buinite’s muscles were lax. Ned spread the short legs apart and went in with the knife, following his instructions precisely. A bone held the penis semierect at all times. The gonads were internal, but they bulged the flesh of the buttocks obviously. The scales there were white and finer than the mottled gray which covered other parts of the autochthone’s body.
The kn
ife was a weapon, not a tool. Its straight, twenty-centimeter blade was double-edged and narrow; not ideal for gelding, but it served well enough.
Ned stabbed, twisted as if he were coring an apple, and pulled the knife away. The ugly gouge filled with blood smearing over the lips of the cut. The excised organs hung by tags of skin. The Buinite remained flaccid, breathing in shallow gusts through its open mouth.
Ned ran to the next victim. If this were a commercial operation rather than punishment and a warning, he would have some means of cauterizing the terrible wounds. The fighting knife was razor-sharp, with an edge of collapsed matter which would stay sharp despite brutal use. It severed the arteries so cleanly that the cut ends shrank closed, leaking relatively little blood.
Not perfect, but good enough. Ned stabbed, twisted, and moved on. The third Buinite slicked nictitating membranes sideways across its eyes as the knife slipped in. The scrambler’s effects were beginning to wear off.
Another victim, this one humped on his face. The limbs splayed as Ned tried to operate from behind, so the knife cut an accidental collop from the autochthone’s thigh. Ned botched the job, leaving the parts still attached but so hideously mutilated that they would never heal normally. He wondered if microorganisms on Buin carried the equivalent of gangrene.
The autochthones were beginning to move. One of those Lissea had gelded moaned loudly.
Ned’s right boot slipped on a stone because the sole was bloody. His arms were sticky green to the elbows. His knife stabbed and turned, this time completing the operation perfectly even though the Buinite tried to rise to its hands and knees while he cut.
Ned wished he were dead rather than doing this.
The next autochthone turned its head as he approached. The creature’s eyes were still mindless.
Guns fired. The tribarrel swept very close and the Warsons let off aimed shots as steady as metronome strokes. A bolt struck an active Buinite so close by that its body fluids sprayed Ned.