by B. V. Larson
“We’ve been overrun!” I shouted. “Fall back in squads, maintain covering fire. Regroup at the tubes if they press us that far back.”
I couldn’t believe it, but we’d been swamped with Centaurs. The enemy was nothing if not brave. They cared little for tactics or their own lives. They just wanted to get to us, to shoot and gore us. They were wild, frenzied. We fought with desperation. I could tell we were many times more organized, but they outnumbered us by twenty to one. I felt like a Roman Centurion facing a raving horde of barbarians.
Two of them came at me at one point. I saw the rolling eyes, the flared nostrils. I let my projector dangle from the cord and slashed at one with my knife. His snout came apart, my nanotized strength and the unnatural sharpness of my blade putting me at an unfair advantage. The Centaur simply lowered his horn-blades and tried to thrust them into me. My battle suit stopped the blades. He had to be mad with pain and rage. Blood gouted everywhere. It was reddish, but darker than the blood of earth creatures. It was like blood that had been dried into a black-red jelly. I used my fist to smash him down to the ground, stopping his blind, furious attack.
The second one came for me then, and my left hand took hold of the horn blades. I lifted him up as if I lifted a rabbit by the ears. My suit surged with relentless power. His hooves kicked out at me, starring my helmet and giving me sore ribs. I gutted him with my knife, which was now free of the first one. I looked at my gloves where I’d grabbed those bladed horns. The blood leaking from them was a lighter red blood. He’d managed to open up my glove.
I heard hissing of released pressure and felt the tickling nanites going to work. They would seal my wound and my suit, I knew.
More came, and the fighting went on. We killed them until we stood atop a mountain of kicking, smoking meat. They killed us as well, here and there.
Suddenly, at some unknown signal, they all turned and ran at once. They flowed over their dead with tremendous agility. My men called after them, cursing and firing into the mass of bodies.
“Cease fire!” I ordered.
Kwon struggled to his feet behind me. He had a hole in between the plates of his battle suit, where his hip joined his torso. Blood ran down to his boots from the spot where he’d been gored. “Cease fire!” he roared, echoing my command with greater volume.
The laser shots died down and soon stopped altogether.
I looked at Kwon as he dug among the bodies, picking them up and throwing them out of our foxhole. I stared at the earthen walls of the defensive position. It hadn’t worked as intended. In fact, due to the enemy tactics, it was possibly worse than standing in the open. When they massed on you, a man had to be in an open area to fight properly, not caught in a ditch that restricted movement and buried you in their dead.
Kwon still ignored his wound and threw one carcass after another out of the foxhole.
“Captain?” I asked. “Are you all right?”
“Fine sir,” he said tightly.
Then I saw him tugging at something more gently. I suspected what it was. Lieutenant Joelle Marquis’ hand. None of my marines had a hand that small. It had to be the pilot.
Finally catching on, I helped him free her from the quivering mass of dead. We soon had her out of the pile of bodies and lying in an open field of dirt. There was no grass, nor any foliage left anymore. It had all been trampled down to dust, beaten by ten thousand hooves.
Looking at her, I figured Kwon would have to get himself a new date. We removed her helmet, knowing the air here was breathable, if not permanently safe. We shot her with extra nanites and had a corpsman work on her with a plastic pump. It wasn’t looking good. She’d sustained broken bones and her lungs didn’t want to work on their own. I knew if her brain had been too badly damaged, she wouldn’t recover.
I took the time to dig out the communications box. It was dented and encrusted in dirt and blood. It still worked after I flipped it on and off again several times.
“This is Kyle Riggs,” I broadcast to the aliens, hoping they were listening. What was the wording they had used? “Herd Honor has been restored—no, recaptured.”
They didn’t say anything for awhile. I wondered if the first wave had just been a taste-test. Maybe the next rush would be the real thing, and instead of twenty-odd thousand we would be hit by half a million raging Centaurs.
“Herd Honor rides the wind again,” said a voice finally.
I had no idea what that meant, but I figured now was the time to go with it. “We are not machines,” I said. “We bleed as you do.”
“You claim Herd Honor?”
I hesitated, trying to think clearly. The Centaurs were a people who had a herd mentality. They weren’t like us. They thought in terms of large groups. They had their own code of honor, that much was clear. I had no idea as to the details, however. I decided to take a neutral stance. “We are a Herd,” I said. “We have Honor. And we hate the machines.”
“You serve the machines. You broke their word for them, and thus have no Honor.”
I thought hard. I looked over to Kwon, who was on his knees over Lieutenant Marquis. The corpsman was going through the motions, but she wasn’t moving. Nobody looked happy.
“We breathe as you do,” I said. “We fight as you do. We bleed as you do.”
“We have taken your measure. We know we can defeat you with our thousands.”
I looked down at the rolling hills ahead. They appeared to be empty, but I knew they were out there, beyond our vision, massing up into a new herd. They would overrun us again, and even if we broke their next wave, they would send another. Eventually, we would be overwhelmed and the last of us would be dragged down and torn apart by these raging beasts.
I looked upward then, toward the roof of the habitat. It was painted sky blue, I realized for the first time. Maybe that was why this structure was not a rotating cylinder. They could have produced an environment with more land that way, but they would have been denied this lovely illusion of a pale blue sky.
We could blow a hole in their sky I knew, just as the Macros had suggested. Very few of the enemy we’d seen had been wearing vacc suits. They would be sucked out into space and suffocated. Victory lay in that direction, and it would only take minutes to achieve. The problem was, it would be a victory for the Macros, not for the biotics.
“We could open your structure to space,” I said. “You would all die.”
“All things die. The grass will grow greener with our passing.”
Great, I thought. These guys glorified death as well. A natural idea for a herd species, I had to figure.
I smiled suddenly. I thought I had it. Sometimes, deception could be a good thing for everyone. “You do not understand. We do not serve the Macros. We escaped them. We came to your structure to escape. We seek sanctuary, not bloodshed. We are ambassadors from another world.”
The pause was long, but not too long. Maybe they felt the seeds of hope right then, the hope that all living beings felt when given an alternative in the face of doom.
“You are not machines. You have fought with Honor. We will listen.”
-13-
I was down to three options: kill all the Centaurs by blowing a hole in their habitat, fight the Centaurs and die against their numbers, or turn against the Macros. I wasn’t quite sure yet which option I was going to choose, but much of the choice revolved around what the Centaurs did next.
Oddly, in the back of my mind, I kept having thoughts of my kids. I hadn’t fought a Centaur since that first fateful day when the Nano ships came to my farm. I had never really gotten over it, of course. When something that traumatic happens to you, a person can push it down, shove it away—but it will always come back. There were dreams and occasional biting thoughts. I would forget about the kids for days, then a stray reminder would hit me, maybe a smell or a familiar sound. Then I would be swamped with visions of Easter egg hunts, bicycle trainings and shoving my butt into tiny chairs on back-to-school nights.
; The heaped bodies of Centaurs all around me triggered these thoughts and feelings. The strange thing was, I felt better about that distant day now. I had promised then to tear up some of these aliens, and now at long last, I’d had my fill of their blood. Even though these individuals had no idea how much I’d once wanted to kill them all, they made me feel like I’d followed through. Killing a dozen or so personally in self-defense had done me a world of good. I could forgive them now. In a way, it was disturbing. Was it right that I should deprive these creatures’ young of their parents? I didn’t know, but I’d once vowed to do it in the name of my dead kids. I suppose the whole mess gave me some kind of closure. I could forgive these creatures now, especially since I knew they really had had no choice when the Nano ships had forced them to fight for their lives.
The machines were next, I thought. Next on my list of guilty parties. I nodded to myself, and inside my helmet a thin, grim smile grew. I knew then I was going to give it a try. I wasn’t going to sacrifice my men to save Earth. I wasn’t going to sacrifice a few million Centaurs to save myself, either. I was going to take the third option. Many might have thought it presumptuous and fantastically risky, kick-starting this war again. The problem was, the way the Macros were treating these Centaurs proved to me that it was only a matter of time. The Macros had no intention of letting us live on forever. They weren’t really our allies. They intended to kill us all, once we were no longer useful to them. Here they were, cheating on their treaty with the Centaurs, and using us to do their dirty work. What if they sent some race of arachnids to Earth, thereby honoring their treaty, but still causing millions to die? It could be happening right now, for all I knew.
I walked over to Kwon, who still hovered over the small, thin form of Joelle Marquis. She had blonde, curly hair, I could see. The corpsman had her intubated with oxygen running down her throat. She was breathing, but that could have been the nanites stimulating her diaphragm muscles.
“Is she going to make it?” I asked.
Kwon shook his head. “Don’t know.”
“If she dies, who would you blame?” I asked him.
For the first time, he looked up at me seriously. “The Macros,” he said. “They sent us here. We will all die here, or the Centaurs will.”
“How about if we make the Macros die instead?” I asked.
Now I had the corpsman’s attention as well as Kwon’s. His helmet tilted up and his eyes met mine through the visor. I saw his name on his uniform.
“Keep working on the lieutenant, Carlson,” I said.
The corpsman quickly looked down again, saying nothing. He fiddled with a box, running leads to Marquis’ chest. I knew what that meant. We had some nice nanite medical kits now. We could just lay a lead on a body, and a needle-thin wire of them would penetrate the flesh on its own. They would drive deep, and could be used to take measurements, deliver drugs or even shock a heart into beating again. The fact he was using the box wasn’t a positive sign, however. It indicated her injuries were mortal, and that her own nanite defense team could not repair her by itself.
Kwon was still staring at me. At last, he nodded his head. “You think now is the time?” he asked.
“I don’t like our other options. Even if we wipe these Centaurs out, the Macros will do the same to us eventually. Maybe very soon. Maybe, they’ve done it already.”
Carlson glanced up again at that. He looked down again without being told. Lieutenant Marquis was making a scratchy, rasping sound. It sounded like she was trying to breathe now, but there was fluid in her lungs.
“They could be hitting Earth even now,” Kwon said thoughtfully. He stood up and stared around at the field, littered with Centaur corpses. “A fine people. I don’t want to kill any more of them.”
“Neither do I,” I said. “Let’s see if we can talk them out of wasting our strength upon one another.”
I went to the communications box, and I started to negotiate. It took a long time. The Centaurs had their own framework for thought, their own culture. They talked constantly of ‘Herd Honor’ and ‘Challenges’. They frequently made references to their ancestors and the weather. They never used the pronoun ‘I’, but always used ‘we’. I did the same, to make them feel comfortable. They thought as a group, so I negotiated as a group.
I figured they would send up a group of leaders, individuals with white fur and long, curled horns. They didn’t present me with such wise old chieftains. They didn’t show themselves at all. I knew they were out there, hiding in the foliage. In the distance, we could see dust plumes where thousands, maybe even millions, marched and gathered. They were preparing to overwhelm us if the talks were fruitless. For my own part, I had my men clear the battlefield of bodies, if only so we could get a free field of fire. We burned down the nearest clumps of foliage to increase the range at which our laser rifles would be effective. It was all for show and to keep the men busy, of course. If the Centaurs charged us they would come with ten times their previous numbers, and all would be lost. I would only have two options then: to die on the spot, taking down as many of them as possible, or to do the bidding of my steel masters, to open up their ‘sky’ and suck them all out into space, kicking and bleating.
I didn’t like either possibility so I kept working with them on the communications box. There were translation problems and misunderstandings. Often, they interpreted what I said as some kind of Challenge, a call to battle. I did my best to disabuse them of these thoughts, but they kept coming back up. Maybe they wanted a fight. I got that feeling the longer I talked to them. They were angry we’d come here, angry the Macros had used us to circumvent their words of peace and angry we’d beaten them back the first time, leaving so many dead upon the field.
At the same time, however, I came to understand that our initial success at combat was the only reason they would talk to us at all. We’d proven ourselves. If we hadn’t, they wouldn’t have listened to anything we said. They were a showy culture, which liked displays of strength. Such displays won status among their herds. As far as I could tell, it was their only qualification for status. They were definitely intelligent, but their thinking was backward to me. They were more tribal and emotional than Earth diplomats could ever have been. Avenging an insult was worth a million deaths to them.
Working on that angle, I soon found myself coming closer to success.
“Yes,” I said, “we have dishonored you and ourselves by serving the machines. But the greater villains are the machines themselves.”
“Dishonor cannot be forgotten by the wind,” said the communications box.
The comment was typical. They constantly spoke in terms of their own idioms and beliefs. I decided to press ahead, not sure what they meant, but sensing they were listening.
“The machines hold our home herds hostage,” I said. “They have no honor, and forced us to come here. They used lies and threats to gain our cooperation. We did not know who we must fight. We only knew that we must fight for them.”
“The rains will fall upon the honored and the dishonored alike!” said the communications box with sudden emotion.
“Exactly!” I said, hoping the rising excitement in the other’s words was a good thing. I had to grab hold of that emotion and channel it, turn it against the Macros where it belonged. “The Macros have dishonored us both. They urinate down both our skins. If they are capable of laughing, they are doing so now.”
A silence followed. “They dare to laugh at our Herds?” the question came at last. The emotional inflection came through as incredulous. I noted that the communications box was getting better at translating the Centaur’s speech. Every minute we used it, the neural net inside fine-tuned itself.
“Yes!” I said. “The machines think we are fools. They work us like—like tools.”
“This is a fine insult. This cannot be borne.”
“We agree. Because of this, we have paused in our fighting. We have changed the direction of our herd. We no longer wish to press
into your lands.”
“You do not claim our lands?”
“No! We do not claim the ground we stand on, and we wish to leave. We wish to join with you, and trample the machines. We will take their lands instead.”
They paused again. I sensed that perhaps a large group of them argued as to how to proceed. During these interludes, it was best to say nothing, as interrupting their thoughts only seemed to make them take longer to come back with a response.
At length, they said: “We will join herds with you, if you have a plan. And you must lead. When no human foot stands upon our lands, we will follow you.”
I took a deep breath and a swig of water from my suit’s reservoirs. The water was warm, but slightly refreshing. I had promised myself to redesign these suits with chillers that worked on the water supply, but hadn’t gotten around to it yet. I wished that I had spent the time. I could use a cold drink right now.
“Sounds like you’ve got them where you want them, Colonel,” said a voice nearby. I turned and saw it was Lieutenant Marquis.
She was standing, but supporting her weight with both hands on Kwon’s arm. He was beaming like a guy with a hot prom date. She had broken her pelvis, but that would heal up in a day or two with the help of a few million hardworking nanites.
I flashed them a smile then waved for them to be quiet. I didn’t want the herds to overhear and get the wrong idea. Kwon led Marquis away. She hobbled and hopped awkwardly.
“Lieutenant?” I called after her. Both of them turned.
“Sir?”
“You think you can pilot one of those assault ships in a few hours?”
She looked at me seriously. “I can. They don’t have pedals, you know.”
“I know,” I said.
Kwon was the only one who didn’t look happy. He had a concerned look. I could tell he was thinking he had just brought Joelle back from the dead, and now I was going to send her into the teeth of the Macros again.
He was right, and it wasn’t fair. But there was nothing I could do about it. I was short on pilots.