by B. V. Larson
Growling and pumping my legs in the mud, I was reduced to crawling before I made it to cover. Harris himself hauled me to my feet and shoved me behind the walls.
“McGill,” he said, “I’ve watched you piss people off for years—but this time, you’ve gone and outdone yourself.”
Looking out through the breach, I could see what he meant. The heavy troopers were charging us from every direction, slogging through the mud despite a constant shower of plasma bolts from legionnaires on top of the walls.
Behind the heavy troopers loomed the giants. They were hulking silhouettes in the rain. Their shields splattered in white flashes with every plasma bolt that hit home.
Cutting through the sounds of the rain and the gunfire, there was a roar to be heard—the cry voiced by a thousand large throats. Their cries were both human and inhuman at the same time.
The overall noise-level was deep and unnatural. Not since the days of gigantic apes, which had gone extinct after the last ice age, had such battle cries been heard on planet Earth.
We killed hundreds before they reached the walls, but we couldn’t hope to stop them all at a safe distance. Heavy troopers sprang up and grabbed the rim of the crumbling wall with hands that looked like they had five thick thumbs each. They hauled themselves up, and despite the fact most were shot to death on the rim, they kept on coming.
A pack of them reached the breach all at once. They were intent on breaking through. Point-blank fire from both sides staggered and shocked the combatants.
The human legionnaires were cornered and desperate, but the enemy was insane. The battle was bloody, and lightning began to play in the skies overhead as it heated up.
We held the breach even when it became choked with squirming, dying fighters. Every time a trooper managed to claw his way past the bodies and grab onto the throat of a legionnaire, we shot him a hundred times or more until he sagged down, another lifeless hulk. The fallen formed uneven bricks, and they were slowly walling off the breach as they piled deep.
Up on the rim of the wall, things didn’t go quite as well. There were mostly Victrix troops up there, and they were stretched too thin. Grabbed and hurled down from the top of the battlements, Olsen’s soldiers were being killed too frequently.
“McGill!” Leeson shouted at me. “Take a team and clear the top of the walls in a sweep. I’ll help with the breach now.”
Leeson had pretty much put himself into the reserves by staying with our wounded in the central bunker. He left his shell at last, but only after seeing how the battle was turning. Behind him, a grim-faced group of injured soldiers hobbled painfully toward my position. Kivi was among them.
“All right,” I said, “Harris, Sargon, Carlos, Montgomery and Bissel, you guys come with me.”
They weren’t happy, but they didn’t argue. They marched at my sides. On my order, we shot down heavy troopers who’d managed to scale the walls and fight their way past the defenders.
Before we’d gone half-way around, though, the nature of the battle shifted. The giants had arrived.
As effective as heavy troopers were, the giants were five times more lethal. It wasn’t just about their height, it was about their weight, vitality and shielding.
They didn’t have to run and jump or scramble over our walls. They only had to scale them as a man might vault or climb over a fence.
The Victrix troops defending the wall top were rolled down into the central pit, often struck dead. Using their energy projectors like clubs, the giants smashed Victrix people down and stood like avenging demons all around the rim of the fort.
Then, as one, they roared in triumph and beamed the central bunker. It was melted to slag, then something inside exploded. The injured, who’d been too weak to fight, perished in searing flames.
“Big bastards,” I said. “Let’s take one out—we’ve done it before.”
My four-man team was right behind me. Advancing on the nearest of the giants, we got his attention with a volley of fire. The guy that really made his shield flicker was Sargon. From the erratic, orange flashes pulsing over the target, I thought the giant was about to go down.
But he turned and ran in our direction instead. He lifted his projector cannon at point-blank range.
“Charge!” I roared, and I began running toward him.
A blinding gush of lavender-white power coursed past me, but I didn’t stop.
We tackled him as fast and hard as we could, but we were like a tribe of pygmies grappling an elephant’s legs. He didn’t fall, he didn’t even stagger.
His big weapon pumped up and down, whistling like a falling tree. He hit Sargon first, maybe because Sargon’s belcher had actually affected his shielding.
Like a broken doll, Sargon’s lifeless body whirled away into the darkness past the walls. The rain and the night swallowed him. He never made a sound, but I was certain he was struck dead.
“Combat knives!” I shouted. “Hamstring him!”
Bullets and beams couldn’t penetrate a shield, but a knife and a gauntlet could. We clung to those ankles and sawed at them. Blood gushed, and finally, Harris cut through. With a confused roar, the monster fell and rolled down into the pit. He’d grabbed Harris with a fist as big as a Christmas ham and took him along for the ride.
I watched, panting, as Harris got a few more licks in with his knife before the giant’s arms bulged and Harris’ head popped clean off. It was the freakiest thing I’d seen in years.
During the fight, however, the giant’s shielding had gone out. We beamed him to smoking meat and headed toward the next monster, who was standing tall and roaring at a circle of Victrix people.
One of them was Centurion Olsen herself. Her eyes were wild with fear and anger. Her unit had been all but wiped out.
We came in to join them, rushing low under the giant’s guard. Once the Victrix pukes knew what we were up to, they came in to help. Only two more died before the giant was brought down.
“You’re insane,” Olsen told me.
“Some say so,” I told her with a shrug, “but I think I just get really, really mad during a fight.”
She blinked away rain and her finger came up to waggle at me.
“You brought this on my unit! You enraged all these aliens! You destroyed my command!”
“What?” I asked. “That’s crazy-talk. I saved us from the star-falls.”
“You weren’t supposed to enrage all of them at once! You weren’t supposed to go out there and parlay with the enemy without permission!”
“Now, hold on a second,” I said, “I had permission. It’s recorded in my tapper, in fact, with your voiceprint clearly identified. I was just following orders—Your orders.”
Her eyes filled with hate and disbelief. It was an odd mixture, but one I’d seen before.
“You knew this was going to happen, didn’t you?” she demanded. “It was a foolish mistake to trust a lunatic of your caliber. McGill, after this is over, you’ll never—”
I would have liked to have heard the rest, but I never got the opportunity. At that precise moment one of the giants who still had a working beam projector aimed it in our direction and blasted Centurion Olsen into two equally blackened halves.
“Damn, that was close!” I said. “Let’s keep moving, people. We have plenty more fighting to do.”
We made it to the next giant and took him down, but that was when the breach Leeson had been defending finally gave way.
Leeson himself contacted me. “It’s all you now, McGill. Toro, Graves, Olsen—you’re the last officer here.”
I tried to question him, but he didn’t answer, and his name went red.
After that, it was a grim fight to the finish. A few hundred surviving heavy troopers and two giants hunted down and killed my rebel team. Right at the end, Carlos revealed something to me. It was a plasma grenade.
He showed it to me and I gave him the nod. Together, we raced into the arms of a giant. Unbelieving of his good luck, he lifted us up i
nto the night sky, one in each hand.
The squeezing strength in those fingers was superhuman. Carlos wasn’t wearing a breastplate, so his ribcage crushed with a crackling sound.
The plasma grenade fell from his lifeless fingers. It fell into the mud at the giant’s feet and glimmered there, active and gathering energy.
Despite my agony, I had time to smile before it went off.
-47-
When I was revived and returned to my accursed life, I fully expected to be thrown back onto the battlefield. That was the normal lot of any legionnaire killed in action: to be promptly reequipped and sent out to fight again. Before I could even think clearly, I was envisioning more combat with giants, squids, and the heavy troopers invading the New York mud.
But that wasn’t how it happened.
I knew something was wrong right off, while I was still flat on my back on the delivery table. The room was too quiet. There was no distant crump and thud of heavy weapons. No sirens, no radios blatting out bursts of static. Nothing but the quiet gurgle of alien machinery.
“How are his stats?”
“They’re good enough.”
“Okay, get him out of here.”
My eyes burned. I tried to look around, but all I could make out was the ceiling. It was a textured alabaster. It was made of puff-crete, of course, but done the old-fashioned way. When they’d first begun building large structures with the stuff, they’d done so in the style of older buildings. They’d kept the look of textured ceilings and lighting fixtures from a century back.
I’d seen those types of ceilings before, and I knew I was in Central.
“Why…?” I croaked aloud.
“What’s that, Adjunct?” asked an irritable male bio. They always seemed to be annoyed about something when they were delivering a new man back to life.
“Why am I back at Central?”
“Because you died with the rest of them. I’m not sure why they asked me to revive you so soon. It’s been mostly high-ranking people all day.”
My eyes worked well enough to focus on the bio specialist’s face. He was young but haggard looking. I could tell right off he’d pulled a long, long shift.
“How many days? How long was I gone?”
“Three days,” he said, glancing at his tapper. “The records say you were lost three days ago.”
“What happened up in New York Sector?”
The bio shook his head. “I haven’t got time to explain. I’m recharging for another revive. No breaks. No sleep—no nothing. Get off my table and get your explanations from the guys upstairs, will you?”
I didn’t get mad. He’d obviously been working to the point of exhaustion. I could respect that. I got up, dressed, and staggered out into the passageways.
Along the way to the elevator, I looked down into the city streets outside through rain-streaked windows. The streets were mostly black. Some buildings were lit here and there, but only sparsely. Could this be a security blackout? Or worse, a power outage?
There were troops down there in the streets. Lines of them were setting up defensive positions in the grid-work of ground traffic. That was a bad sign—a very bad sign. They were preparing to fight in the streets around the building.
By the time I made it up to Varus headquarters, I was pretty worried. The news on my tapper had told me a grim tale.
We’d lost the battle in the north. We’d lost everything. Legion Varus had been a wipe. Victrix too. After the hog lines broke between the more experienced legions, our gambit to seal the hole had failed. I’d died days ago, so I’d missed some of the fun.
An all-out assault had begun on our positions in my absence. They’d poured literally millions of troops into the breaches. Strangely, they didn’t seem to care about their losses anymore. Encircling the hold-out legions, they crushed them by sheer weight.
Reaching my quarters and my locker, I found the place empty. Could I really be the only one in my unit who’d been revived? If there was anyone else, they weren’t around.
Dressing thoughtfully, I heard a voice behind me as I pulled my boots on.
“McGill?” asked an unpleasant voice. “It’s about time you showed up.”
I turned in surprise and faced Primus Winslade. “Winslade? They haven’t managed to perm you yet, huh?”
His eyes narrowed. Such talk was acceptable between officers who were giving one another a hard time, but there were a couple of ranks and a lot of bad blood between us, so he knew I meant it.
“Funny,” he said like he was spitting out the word. “Very funny. We’re to report to upstairs immediately.”
We headed back to the elevators. I’d been planning sticking around my unit’s quarters, but that clearly wasn’t what the higher-ups had in mind.
Primus Winslade marched primly in front of me, and it was hard not to daydream about fragging the little bastard.
In the elevator, he punched up a very high floor number and that lifted my eyebrows.
“Why are we going up to the top?” I asked. “Isn’t that a little extreme?”
“What would be extreme is if you could keep silent for two minutes.”
I studied him while he focused on the elevator digits, which spun rapidly.
“You know what’s up, don’t you?” I asked him. “You came down here to get me personally. Who sent you?”
“Your commander did,” he said. “Your rightful commander.”
His words left me with a confused frown. I could count any number of rightful commanders in my chain to the top. Any of them could have been the one to demand my presence, but I didn’t know why they’d bother.
As we approached a pair of golden doors, I began to replay all my most recent crimes in my head. Which one had brought me to the attention of the brass on Gold Level this time?
It could have been any of several things. The first that occurred to me was a fresh inquiry into my role in the initial attack on Central. That would explain why Winslade was coming along and his attitude. Sure, the attack was old news, but the military rarely forgot a sin.
There had also been several irregularities during the teleportation missions. When I thought about it, nothing much had gone right with that effort from the start.
Then, of course, there was the latest interaction with the squids. I doubted that would come back to bite me in the ass so soon, but you never knew.
When we finally got past several of the guards and checkpoints, we made our way into Drusus’ office. There, I was in for quite a shock.
Drusus wasn’t alone. Graves was there too, and both Drusus and Graves were standing at attention over by the window.
Sitting ramrod straight behind the desk was one of the last people I’d ever expected to meet again: Equestrian Nagata.
My mouth sagged, and I glanced at Winslade. He gave me a tiny smirk which indicated he’d been in on this all along.
“There you are, McGill,” Nagata said. “Good. We can now proceed. I need you as a witness.”
“Hold on!” I boomed. “I thought you’d been permed, sir!”
Nagata flapped a hand at me. I thought it was an odd gesture, one I couldn’t recall seeing him perform before.
“Quiet,” he said. “Someone obviously found a backup of my memory and DNA.” He turned to Drusus. “As I was saying… in my absence you took over Central’s defensive operations. Is this correct?”
“Yes.”
“Wasn’t there anyone else more suitable to assume command?” Nagata demanded.
“If you mean someone more experienced in battle with the cephalopods—no, there wasn’t.”
“I’m talking about someone of superior rank. I find it absurd that a mere tribune from an independent legion was chosen to lead Hegemony to her destruction. In fact, I find the situation highly suspicious.”
“I was given the rank of Imperator, sir,” Drusus pointed out.
Nagata nodded with an unpleasant expression. “Yes… your motivations in this matter are very clear
.”
My eyes swung to Drusus, who was looking a bit worried. Had there been some funny business going on that I hadn’t been involved in? For the first time, I began to wonder if Drusus had tried to go off-script.
Officers had talked to me in the past about my unsanctioned actions, at times even admiring them. But I’d always cautioned them against trying to mimic my behavior. Some men have a knack for that sort of thing and some don’t. Drusus had always impressed me as a straight-arrow. If he had tried to pull something, I wasn’t surprised that it’d turned into a disaster.
Nagata spoke in a doom-laden voice. “You took command. You didn’t attempt to get a superior officer for the job. Now, our defensive army has been decimated. There’s nothing between Central and two million invading troops.”
“I thought it was three million,” I said loudly.
He glanced at me. “They didn’t kill our army without losses. They seem, in fact, to be careless about their losses now.”
I shut up. I hadn’t meant to speak out in the first place, but it had just happened.
Still, I was impressed. Even I was able to do the math. A million invaders face-down in the mud? We’d bloodied them pretty good.
Unfortunately, it hadn’t been good enough because they were still on the march.
“Well?” Nagata demanded. “What do you have to say for yourself, Tribune?”
He was still refusing to acknowledge Drusus’ new rank, and that made everyone uncomfortable.
Everyone turned their attention to Drusus, and he hesitated. “The top brass here at Central were all dead at that time—including you, I might add, Equestrian. I was told they’d all been permed. As the most senior officer on site with the appropriate experience, I assumed command.”
Nagata’s eyes were stern.
“Amazing,” he said. “Such wild hubris. You never asked for an emergency replacement from the ruling council, did you? Just a promotion?”
“An emergency replacement? No, sir.”
Nagata got up from his desk. He put his hands behind his back and began to pace around the office.