Sriti stepped back and locked his gaze onto her golden eyes. “I shall return for you,”
Nodding at Kayshen-Oeyl, she turned to lead her companions back to 342.
“Anything you want to say to me?” he asked Kayshen-Oeyl. He’d been around Littoranes long enough to read the amusement in her tilted stance. Still, it was better than being pissed at him.
“Ever since I met you, Urdizine, you have been close to death, injured, or otherwise weak. I see now that you are easily reawakened to life with the correct stimulus.”
He sighed. “What can I say? Sriti’s a hot warrior princess, and I’m a legionary. That’s what we sign up for. Now, let’s get ourselves to the other side of that gate and take stock of the situation.”
Before she could reply, a dozen Ferals raced through the gateway, scuffing the rocky ground with their knuckles before leaping like humanoid lice into the spear-armed people near the gate.
Many defenders screamed and fled, but others didn’t, and stood their ground, quickly dispatching the enemy, though not without loss.
“We need to form a crescent to meet them,” Urdizine warned Kayshen-Oeyl. He itched to get himself into the fight, but he was in no shape, nor was the force of his voice strong enough to issue commands over the clamor of a spear-and-claw melee.
She acknowledged and organized the defenses on the near side of the gate while Urdizine observed. They’d barely begun when more Ferals burst through.
These were vicious brutes, many jumping over the front rank of defenders and slashing down with their dagger-tipped tails as they descended on anyone behind.
Despite their frantic energy, the attackers were quickly overwhelmed, trampled, and stabbed by the defenders who enormously outnumbered them.
After the first batch, they came in twos and threes. They showed no regard for their own lives, no coordination or tactics. They were little balls of hate that smashed into the defenders with claw, fang, and tail.
When a line of 20 Devil Men walked through, Urdizine feared the fighters on the far side had been overwhelmed. He could imagine the Ferals breaking through gaps in the line like supercharged attack dogs, but the larger Devil Men sauntered through without a care in the galaxy. Two at the flanks fired blasters into the crowd, while the others stood there turning their flattened heads as they surveyed the situation.
This, it seemed, was the enemy trying to understand why its harvesting wasn’t proceeding as expected. It was their first indication of intelligence.
Kayshen-Oeyl roared at her warriors to charge the Devil Men and push through to the other side of the gate. They couched their spears like lances and charged. Before they crashed into the enemy, Humans returned through the gate and gunned down the Devil Men from behind.
These were Cora’s World extremists. Behind them, d’Anje strode into view.
“Listen to me,” he told the crowd. “I know you’re tired, and you’re afraid, but this is the critical moment of the battle to save the people trapped in 241. I need you to dig deep within yourselves and lend me your strength and your courage.”
For the first time, Urdizine could see why the Humans were gravitating toward d’Anje, even those who despised the Cora’s World ideology. The man was strong, he was in command, and he was a natural battle leader.
That made him dangerous.
Then he did something surprising, too, seeing as d’Anje was steeped in the paradoxical idea that since Humans had developed the ideology of hyper-aggressive equalization, alien species were of sub-Human value. He repeated what he’d just said in classical Littorane.
The Littoranes pricked up their ears at that.
“We can’t save everybody,” d’Anje continued in Terran, “but we must save more. You’re needed now, my friends, to secure a foothold on the far side of the gate. This is your moment.”
He repeated himself in Littorane, but by then, all the warriors were surging forward.
Urdizine found himself seized by the moment. He joined the throng headed for battle.
Kayshen-Oeyl intercepted him, now protected by two squads of her personal guards. “Not you. You would be a liability.” She thrust a blaster into his hands, an old HC1.
Rearing up, she addressed her elite personal guard in a deep voice, “Urdizine is my deputy on this side of the gate. He is my commander of all forces here. Stay with him and do not let the monsters through.”
In a quieter voice, she added for Urdizine’s benefit, “I’ll keep an eye on d’Anje.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Urdizine set about organizing his new command.
* * * * *
Chapter Twenty-Three: Urdizine
Before Urdizine finished positioning his troops, the battle came to him.
Scores of Ferals crashed through the gate, followed by two lines of Devil Men armed with energy weapons.
This was different from before. This felt organized.
“Stand your ground,” Urdizine ordered, his instructions relayed by the four Littoranes who’d carried his litter to 100 or so warriors remaining to him. “Let the Ferals come onto your spear points and tail clubs.”
Thousands more from 241 and 343 remained on this side of the gate, mostly armed, but not warriors. To them he shouted to hold their position in case the first line should fall.
The Ferals pounced as before, jumping on the backs of Littoranes.
But the giant newts were tough. Though they suffered terrible lacerations from flicks of Feral tails that left many bleeding out, their comrades quickly clubbed the Ferals to the ground and then smashed in their skulls.
The Devil Men waited for the Ferals to complete their attack before firing.
Urdizine didn’t. He’d set his fighters facing the gate in a concave line two Littoranes deep. He was at the door control with two Littorane guards to protect not so much him, but the firepower of the blaster he carried. He’d given the other blaster to a Human volunteer, a retired legionary in his 110s named Iytal. He’d also given him two guards and set the silver-haired old jack at the other end of the line.
When Urdizine starting popping bolts into the Devil Men, Iytal did the same on the far side.
The range was 25 yards, the perfect killing ground for blasters. Blasters of both sides.
Many Littorane warriors fell, but the survivors held their ground. Meanwhile, the enemy staggered back on their weird digitigrade legs, stunned by the experience of being caught in enfilade fire.
“Charge them!” Urdizine screamed.
The second rank flung stones through gaps in the first, which felled a few, and wounded others. The main effect was to disrupt the fire of the Devil Men, which became erratic and poorly aimed. It was still punishing. This kind of short-range firefight was precisely the type of engagement blasters were designed for. Littorane bodies fell in such numbers that the charging warriors struggled to clamber over the obstacles of the dead and dying.
The incoming blaster fire ceased.
In the middle of a firefight, the Devil Men stopped to regard each other, turning their weird-as-shit heads that looked like they’d been snipped from the thoraxes of giant flattened ants and screwed onto torsos of hock-legged Humans.
Urdizine watched all this in astonishment, but his disciplined fire didn’t falter, sending bolt after bolt into the enemy.
Most of them were dead now, but the survivors sidestepped in a choreographed move. The Littoranes had been using a simple checkerboard formation to allow ranks to pass through each other. The Devil Men were copying what they’d seen used against them. It was pointless, because most of them were now dead, but Urdizine didn’t like the proof that they could learn and adapt.
Through the open channels came the next wave of the attack. Monsters.
They were giant grubs the size of a truck, with the characteristic necrotic purple and bone mottling. The hairs that stuck out of their plump bodies were as long as his arm and as fat as his finger.
He poured blaster bolts into them, but they didn’t se
em to even notice. It was just as well they couldn’t manage more than a walking pace.
Iytal didn’t waste his bolts, he kept pouring fire upon the Devil Men, quickly finishing off the last of them.
With the Littorane warriors surrounding the monsters and making ineffectual attempts to club, cut, and stab them, a fresh wave of Devil Men jogged through the gate and showed another sign of intelligence mixed with a liberal dose of stupidity. While Iytal and Urdizine shot at them, they huddled together as if in conference, ignoring the air screaming with induced plasma. The survivors split into two, each section charging one of the two defenders armed with energy weapons.
A bolt sizzled through the gap between Urdizine’s legs, leaving a glassy scar on the ground.
Damn! This was getting close.
Urdizine hit the ground and continued firing from the prone position, trying to ignore the pain this elicited from his stomach.
“Cease firing,” his guards told him. Two of them raced away to finish off the last of the Devil Men.
The grub creatures were deep in the Littorane line now, their puffy bodies rippling under the impact forces of Littorane tail strikes.
Puckered orifices covered the hides of the monsters. Urdizine had seen these used to ingest raw materials and pump out what they themselves had consumed. Several of these orifices had Littorane spears buried deep within them, but none of this seemed to trouble the creatures.
He watched as one of the orifices at the front of a grub opened up to reveal itself as a maw. This extended out five meters and engulfed a Littorane head. The victim floundered while their comrades stabbed at the extended mouth part.
It was impervious to their attacks. Then the Littorane was sucked inside, leaving just a spear behind to fall to the floor. The maw retracted inside the monster’s body and could be seen no longer.
By now, the Ferals were dead, and the Devil Men almost finished off.
The monsters remained, impervious, but slow.
“Keep away from the fat worms,” Urdizine ordered, his words relayed by Littoranes as before. “We need to reform the line at the gate.”
As the formation regained its position, the monsters behind them carried on in a straight line toward the mass of civilians, who naturally backed away.
Urdizine guessed the creatures weren’t used to prey that hadn’t already been killed by the first wave of harvesting attacks.
He walked over to the nearest one, shoved his blaster’s barrel into one of the orifices in its flank, and pulled the trigger.
Energy throbbed through the weapon as the plasma induction lances were charged and spat into the creature. He knew they were working, because he felt its hide warm up. Steam rose from the orifice he was firing into, then from the neighboring ones.
He reckoned he was hurting the thing, but it kept plowing on, lazily changing direction in pursuit of prey.
With the charge pack depleting rapidly, Urdizine gave up. He couldn’t kill it that way.
“Ferals!” came a cry from the gate.
Urdizine hurried over to meet this new threat.
The personal guard Kayshen-Oeyl had left Urdizine comprised the best Littorane fighters, many of whom had won combat experience resisting the invaders of Rho-Torkis. A few of them had fought the Legion, perhaps fighting against Urdizine on that frozen lake outside Camp Faxian.
That was a sore Urdizine had no intention of opening up today. They were doughty fighters, and he was proud of them.
The Ferals came through in bursts of three or four individuals, charging the defenders’ tails, teeth, and claws, eyes bulging and mouths frothing with spittle in their frenzied urge to kill! Kill! KILL!
Their ferocity made them seem larger than they actually were. The four-foot-high humanoids were significantly lighter than Littoranes, and Urdizine’s fighters quickly learned to work in teams, grabbing Feral tails to pin them to the ground so their comrades could club their heads.
A stream of runners kept communication flowing between the fighters on either side of the gate. They also carried the energy weapons dropped by the enemy to the front line. D’Anje was in charge of maintaining the foothold on the other side, and he’d stabilized the defenses. However, the Ferals were too nimble, and when they surged, some would burst through, uncaring that most of them would be gunned down before they even reached the gate.
The mounds of Feral corpses grew so immense that they slowed the Ferals’ advances. They also impeded the stream of refugees flowing from 241. Urdizine couldn’t have that. People who were crushed into dense mobs as they crowded to get between the mounds and out through the gate would be vulnerable to attack.
So he sent parties of civilians to bring the Feral corpses back and pile them into walls that would channel any new attacks and provide ramparts for stone and spear throwers, and old Iytal with his blaster.
Satisfied that the defenses were as good as he could get them for now, Urdizine turned his attention back to the monsters at his rear.
* * * * *
Chapter Twenty-Four: Urdizine
He was at a loss. He’d seen these beasts clubbed, slashed, and stabbed, with spears sticking out their hides, and yet they barely noticed.
The Humans of 241 had reported killing a few, but each had taken an undisturbed team half an hour of constant hacking to finally wear it down.
The creature Urdizine was examining twisted, circling constantly in an attempt to catch and eat him. It was too slow, but if a line of these creatures trapped victims against a wall, there would be nowhere to run.
“Admiring the enemy?”
“Sriti! I thought you’d gone.”
“We heard the sounds of battle, and I did not wish to leave you. Rest assured, my people will still come. We have sharp ears and long memories. We knew something evil eventually visited every hex world. This day has not come as a total surprise to us.”
Urdizine nodded gratefully at the warrior woman. “It feels good to have you with me. These are tough creatures to kill. The Humans have managed it, though it wasn’t easy.”
His gaze fell to her hips. “But they didn’t have these,” he said. He took the knife from her belt and jogged to the rear of the creature.
Bringing his arm across in a slashing blow, he cut off one of the bone hairs near its base.
The creature shuddered and altered its path slightly.
It wasn’t much, but it had noticed that more than a hundred blaster bolts.
Employing the knife as a machete, he set to work cutting off the hairs.
He explained to Sriti. “There are scurrying creatures distantly related to the Humans who use hairs as sensory organs. I don’t see eyes or ears on this monster. I think it sees the world through these hairs.”
The more he cut, the slower it tracked him. After slashing away half its hairs, he seemed to have reached a tipping, point because the creature stopped moving.
He circled it, and it gave no reaction. It appeared totally dormant.
“I think we’ve found a defense against these things.”
“Very impressive,” Sriti said, “but I prefer to attack.”
She pulled herself up the creature’s flanks to stand on its back, then she thrust her spear through one of its valve orifices. He so enjoyed the sight and scent of her that he didn’t point out that these beasts had been untroubled by spears hanging out their sides.
Sriti looked down at him in triumph with hands on hips. The whole thing was an excuse to show off to him. He enjoyed that, too. It had been a long time since anyone had bothered.
Foam bubbled out of the creature’s flank.
From the summit of the beast, she yanked out her spear, releasing a geyser of milky bubbles.
The creature twitched and then slumped like a flat tire.
“Outstanding,” Urdizine said. “How did you manage that?”
“Do you not use poison on your spears?”
He laughed. “Remind me not to touch anything if you ever invite me to yo
ur home.”
“I shall,” she said, and she sounded serious. “It is good that I returned. You are brave, Urdizine, but you need protecting. I choose that role for this battle.”
“That’s sweet, but I hardly need…”
She leaped down from the creature’s back, the movement flicking up the armor strips to reveal muscular thighs that absorbed the impact with ease.
“You hardly need what?” she asked, running her fingers through her foliage, which released more of her powerful scent.
The Humans had a saying for every occasion. There was one about gift horses that came to mind, especially hot ones. He gave a sheepish grin. “I hardly need to fear the enemy if I know you’re by my side.”
Sriti reclaimed her knife. “Your words are lies, but they are pretty ones. They will suffice.”
Leaving Sriti to organize teams to deal with the monsters at their rear by snapping off their hairs, he rejoined the line at the gate. There had been no more Feral attacks since he’d left. Through the portal came the sounds of battle: shouts, blaster whines, and screams. People were standing there in crude lines, throwing stones picked off the ground. Others tended to the wounded.
Urdizine sent runners to tell the fighters what he’d learned about the monster hairs. After that, he couldn’t stay there any longer. Not when he had a blaster with a quarter-charged pack left and the training to use it effectively. His injuries meant he would be a liability on campaign, but nothing was stopping him from taking a knee and putting bolts downrange.
When Sriti soon rejoined him, they jogged over to Iytal, who was standing behind a rampart of fallen Ferals on the right side of the gate, the opposite side from the control panel.
“Are you up to taking charge of this line?” Urdizine asked the old legionary.
Iytal kept watch over the gate, not turning to look at him. “Are you deserting us, Urdizine?”
Hold the Line (Chimera Company Book 5) Page 14