Ben Bova – Orion Among the Stars

Her grin faded. “Just what I thought,” she said somberly. “You’re not a regular army officer at all, are you?”

I sat back down on the cot. “I’ve been selected to lead this mission by-” What could I say? A god? One of the Creators? An incredibly advanced descendant of the human race who regards us mere mortals as tools for his use, slaves for his whims? “-by the upper echelons,” I finished lamely.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “Most of us have already figured out that this mission is some fucked-up brainchild of the higher echelons. Why else would they have replaced our regular captain?”

“Was he your regular partner?”

Her eyes widened. “You are a stranger, aren’t you? Soldiers don’t have regular partners. The army decides who you pair with, just like the army decides everything else in life.”

I began to understand. These soldiers are created by the army, to serve in the army. They know no other life. No parents, no families. Nothing but the military way of life. Nothing but serving in the army.

“I wonder why,” I mused aloud, “the army didn’t do away with the sex drive altogether. Or even make its soldiers sexless.”

Frede made a noise that sounded like an angry snort. “Might as well ask why they don’t use robots instead of cloned humans.”

“Well, why not?”

“Because we’re cheaper, that’s why! And better, too. Because we have emotions. Ever see a robot charge in where it’s hopeless? Yeah, sometimes we get scared, sometimes we even run-but more often we stand and fight and kill our enemies even when we’re dying ourselves.”

I took a deep breath, considering all that. Then I said, “So the army allows sex as a form of reward, then.”

For an instant I thought she was going to slap me. Her eyes blazed with fury. “Where are you from? The army allows sex because without it we don’t fight as well. The sex drive is intimately entangled with human aggression and human protectiveness-both of them-at the deepest genetic levels. Don’t you understand that? Don’t you know anything?”

“Guess I don’t,” I admitted.

“By damn, I hope you know more about fighting than you do about the army.”

“I know about fighting,” I said softly.

“Do you?”

I nodded, then got to my feet again and left her standing in the middle of her tent, looking more troubled than angry. I knew about fighting, from the Ice Age battles against the Neanderthals to the sweeping conquests of the Mongol hordes. From the war against Set’s dinosaurs and intelligent reptilians to the sieges of Troy and Jericho.

I knew about fighting. But what did I know about leading a hundred soldiers in a war that spanned the galaxy, a nexus in space-time that would decide the existence of the continuum?

I began to find out.

Outside Frede’s medical tent, most of my troopers were busy assembling the transceiver that would be the hub of our base on planet Lunga. I could see from the number of modules they had already uncrated that we would have to knock down some of the trees to make room for the assembly. Two of the sergeants already had a team working on that, on the other side of what I now considered to be our base camp.

One squad was setting up the antimissile lasers, the only heavy weaponry that had been sent down with us.

“Nice of the big brass to send this down with us,” one of the troopers was saying as she connected cables from the power pack to the computer that directed the lasers.

“Yeah, sure,” groused the man working alongside her. “They don’t want their nice shiny transceiver bombed into a mushroom cloud.”

“Well, the lasers protect us, too, you know.”

“Yeah, sure. As long as we’re close to the transceiver we’ll be safe from nuclear missiles.”

“That’s something, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, sure. The brass loves us. They stay up nights worrying about our health and safety.”

The young woman laughed.

Other troopers were setting up bubble tents and stacking our supplies. All of them had shed their armor in the morning warmth and were working in their fatigues, which were rapidly becoming stained with sweat. The insects that had plagued us during the night had disappeared with the dappled sunlight filtering through the canopy of leaves high above us. The little camp sounded busy, plenty of grunts and grumbles and swearing. In the background I could hear birds trilling and chirping. Then the cracking, rushing roar of a giant tree coming down. A thunderous crash. The ground shuddered and everything went quiet. But only for a moment. The birds started in again, the soldiers returned to their chores.

I walked past the construction crews, out toward the perimeter where Sergeant Manfred was in charge of the security detail. He was in his mottled green armor, helmet on, speaking by radio to the soldiers on guard through the woods.

“Anything out there?” I asked him. I myself wore only my fatigues, although I had my comm helmet on and I kept a pistol strapped to my hip. I remembered a time when I wore a dagger on my thigh, out of sight beneath my clothes. I missed its comforting pressure.

“There’s something bigger than a tree lemur moving out at the edge of our sensor range,” Manfred said, his voice low and hard.

“Intelligence claims there’s nothing bigger than tree lemurs on the planet.”

“Those swamp things were bigger.”

“But here on dry land?”

“Could be enemy scouts,” he said flatly.

“Maybe we should dig in, prepare to fight off an attack.”

“Does Intelligence know how many of these Skorpis are on the planet?”

“They claim only a small unit, guarding a construction team.”

Manfred grunted.

I agreed with him. Intelligence had not inspired me with confidence, so far on this mission. “I’ll get a squad to start digging in as soon as some heavy equipment comes through the transceiver. In the meantime, you-”

The blast knocked me off my feet, sent me tumbling a dozen meters. Clods of dirt and debris pattered down on me; acrid smoke blurred my vision. I could hear other explosions, and the sharp crackling sound of laser weapons.

Manfred slithered on his belly toward me. “You okay, sir?”

“Yes!” There was blood on my hand, but that was nothing. “Get your men back toward the base.”

“Right!”

I lay there on my belly and squinted out into the woods as I yanked my pistol from its holster. Scarcely any shrubbery to hide behind in this parklike forest, but whole divisions of troops could be sheltered behind those massive trees. I wormed my way backward, looking for a depression in the ground that might offer a modicum of protection.

A laser beam singed past me, red as blood. I fired back before realizing that I should turn off the visible adjunct to the beam. The red light made it easy to see where your beam was hitting, but it also made it easy for the enemy to see where it was coming from. Tracers work both ways, I remembered from some ancient military manual.

Sure enough, a flurry of beams lanced out toward me. My senses went into overdrive as they always did in battle, slowing the world around me, but that was of little use against light-beam weapons. One of the laser bolts puffed dirt scant centimeters from my face; my eyes stung and I tasted dirt in my mouth. Another burned my shoulder. I hunkered down flatter, trying to disappear into the ground, spitting pebbles and blinking dust from my eyes.

A trio of grenades were arcing toward me. With my senses in overdrive I saw them wafting lazily through the air like little black grooved toy balloons. I popped each of them with my pistol while they were still far enough away for their explosions to harmlessly pepper the empty ground with shrapnel. Then a rocket grenade whooshed out of the woods; I had barely enough time to hit it.

I inched backward a bit more, still peering into the trees to find a trace of the enemy. Nothing. They were devilishly good at this. I heard a few muted explosions thudding far behind me, then silence. Minutes dragged by. Birds began to sing again, insects to chirrup.

I lay flat, staring into the trees, straining to catch some sight of the enemy, some trace of movement. Nothing. I carefully clicked off the visible tracer beam of my pistol, then fired into the general area where the grenades had come from. Still nothing. I held the beam steady on a bit of shrubbery until it burst into flame, but still no sign of movement, no sight of the enemy.

“Captain?” I heard in my earphones. My second-in-command, Lieutenant Quint.

“Go ahead, Quint,” I whispered into my helmet mike.

“Are you all right, sir?”

“Hit in the shoulder. A few scratches. Nothing serious.”

“They seem to have gone, sir.”

I ordered the security detail to report in, by the numbers. Four of my troopers had been killed, six more wounded. No further reports of enemy activity.

I waited for nearly an hour. Nothing. The rest of the hundred had dropped their construction chores, of course, and grabbed their weapons to come out and reinforce our perimeter. But the enemy had vanished as suddenly as they had struck.

Finally we trudged back into the still-unfinished camp. I doubled the perimeter guard while Lieutenant Frede looked after the wounded and a burial detail froze the dead. Frede seemed puzzled as she applied protein gel to my burned shoulder.

“Your wounds are halfway healed already.”

“It’s a capability that was built into me,” I said.

“But how? Biomedical science doesn’t know how to do that. If we did we’d make all our soldiers this way.”

I shrugged as she sprayed a bandage onto my lacerated hand. “I suppose I’m a new model. The first of a new breed.”

She gave me a suspicious stare.

“Well, the important thing is that we beat them off,” I said, trying to sound cheerful.

She still looked doubtful.

Outside her medical tent I saw Sergeant Manfred waiting for treatment. His face was nicked and one arm roughly bandaged with a blood-soaked rag.

“We beat them off,” I repeated to him.

“They’re still out there,” he said somberly, with the flat assurance of a veteran. “That was just a probe. They’ll be back. Tonight, most likely.”

Chapter 4

Humans are diurnal creatures. We sleep in darkness and are active during the daylight hours. The Skorpis, my briefings had informed me, were descended from felines. They were nocturnal. All the more reason why our night landing made no sense. All the more reason to believe that Manfred was right; the next Skorpis attack would be at night.

I wanted to be prepared for it, but I was caught on the horns of a dilemma. The more men I put to guarding our perimeter, the fewer were available to assemble the matter transceiver. Without the transceiver we could not get the heavy weapons and sensors that we needed to make our makeshift base reasonably secure from attack.

We had one heavy weapon: the pair of antimissile lasers that, once assembled, could knock missiles out of the sky at ranges far enough to protect us from nuclear warheads. Or so the briefing tapes claimed. I shuddered at the thought of having nuclear weapons used against us. Apparently the high command had the same fear: hence the antimissile system. Our orders were to assemble it first, which we had very happily set out to do.

I gambled and put as many of the troops on the assembly task as possible. That meant roughly half of them. More would simply get in each other’s way. The others guarded the perimeter while the construction job-heavy lasers and transceiver-hurried along.

I walked the perimeter myself, studying the landscape, searching for whatever advantages I could find in the natural fall of the terrain. If I had not been so preoccupied I might have enjoyed the afternoon. The forest was actually quite beautiful, the trees tall and straight and stately, the sunlight filtering through the leafy canopy so high up above dappling the ground with patches of brightness. Colorful birds swooped among the trees; insects buzzed and chirped. I even saw a few small furry things scampering across the mossy ground and climbing up the tree trunks. Too small to be one of Intelligence’s tree lemurs, I thought.

I saw no sign of the Skorpis or any other enemies. Not a spent power pack, not a footprint on the soft ground. Several of the trees were singed or scratched from shrapnel, but that might just as easily have been from our own firing as the enemy’s. For all the traces they left, the Skorpis might as well have been figments of our imagination.

But I did see something that interested me. A broad shallow gully that ran from a nearby stream toward the center of our base. A natural pathway aimed directly at the heart of our encampment. A stealthy battalion could crawl along that gully unnoticed by soldiers on either side of it, especially at night with a firefight going full bore. It had to be guarded, blocked.

Or maybe not. I began to wonder if the Skorpis had already scouted the area and noted the gully. Perhaps when they attacked-tonight, if Manfred was right-they would send a team to probe this sunken highway. If they found it undefended, they might send the main force of their attack along its length, to erupt deep inside our perimeter and shatter our defenses.

That’s what I would do if I were in their place. Now how could I turn it into a trap?

I started back toward our lines, my head buzzing with ideas.

My three lieutenants were skeptical.

“Invite them to push along the gully?” Lieutenant Vorl asked, her voice high with anxiety. “Let them penetrate our perimeter?”

We were in my bubble tent, squatting on the plastic floor like a quartet of Neolithic tribesmen. Again I was struck by the physical similarities among the officers. Sandy hair, freckles, sky blue eyes. Their skin was a light tan, almost golden, as if blended from all the races of Earth. Vorl and Frede could have almost been twin sisters. Quint, my second-in-command, their brother.

“We don’t have the manpower to hold the entire perimeter against them,” I said. “And we need another six hours before the blasted transceiver is operational. If we can trap a major part of their force and annihilate them, we might be able to break their attack and stay alive long enough to get the transceiver working.”

“What about reinforcements?” Quint asked.

I turned to Vorl, my communications officer.

“No reinforcements,” she said sullenly. “I worked my request all the way up to the admiral, and the damned lizard turned us down cold.”

“We have to hold on until the transceiver starts bringing in the heavy weapons,” I said, for about the twentieth time.

“But inviting the enemy to infiltrate down that gully…” Lieutenant Vorl shuddered.

“I agree,” said Quint. “It goes against standard tactical doctrine.”

“Lieutenant Frede, what’s your opinion?” I asked.

She shook her head, said nothing.

“All right, then,” I said. “Three against and one in favor. The ayes have it.”

They looked surprised, almost angry. But they took my orders without further grumbling. We spent the hours of twilight setting up our perimeter defenses and mining the gully. I placed a weak screen of automated rifles about a third of the way down the gully, just to give the enemy the impression that the gully was not totally unguarded. I did not want them to discover that they were in a trap until it was too late for them to escape. At the end of the gully, a scant fifty meters from the edge of the transceiver itself, I placed ten of the steadiest troops with Sergeant Manfred. If the enemy reached that far, they had to hold them until the rest of us could come to their aid.

All work on assembling the transceiver had to stop when it became truly dark. We needed every soldier on guard, and I did not want our work lights to illuminate the area for the enemy. Not that they needed illumination. True to their feline heritage, the Skorpis could see quite well in darkness that would seem total to a human.

At least we had the antimissile lasers up and working. If the enemy tried to take us out with a missile attack, we were ready for them. I hoped.

Waiting was the toughest thing of all. The night was dark. No moon, and thick low clouds scudding across the distant twinkling stars. The biting insects swarmed at us again, making everyone miserable. Voices hooted out of the woods, night birds clacked and chirped with almost mechanical regularity. Now and then something would give out a weird, high-pitched howl.

Nothing bigger than a tree lemur had been identified on Lunga, I reminded myself. But those howls sounded as if something quite large was making them.

We scratched at our bug bites and grumbled and waited.

I was hunkered down in a shallow dugout a few meters to the right of the gully, in full armor-dented legging and all. My rifle rested on the sill of upturned earth in front of me. My belt and webbing were studded with grenades and spare power packs. Pistol on my hip, combat knife in my boot. I thought again of the dagger that Odysseus had given me; I missed its comforting presence, but it would have been of scant use strapped against my thigh, beneath my armor.

The sensors in my visor showed a tranquil forest. No sign of the enemy. I even saw an actual tree lemur, or something very like one, climbing slowly down one of the trunks, staring in my direction with enormous eyes, and then working its way back up the trunk until it finally disappeared into the foliage high above.

They have to attack tonight, I told myself. They want to knock out the transceiver before we get it operational. It makes no sense for them to wait until-

“Some movement in fourth sector,” I heard a sergeant’s guarded whisper in my earphones.

That was off to my left. I peered across the gully and into the trees out there. I could see nothing.

But when I swung my head back I saw a flicker of movement among the trees directly in front of me. They’re out there, I told myself. Getting ready to hit us.

What if they use nukes? I had pondered that question all day. The transceiver components were shielded; nothing short of a direct hit would damage them. Our body armor could absorb a lot of punishment and protect us from radiation. But a tactical nuclear grenade could kill most of us very quickly and allow the enemy to walk in and dismantle the transceiver by hand, if they wanted to. We had no defense against tactical nukes.

Nor did we have any nukes of our own. Our mission was basically logistical, not attack. If anyone started throwing nukes around, it would be the enemy and we would be fried meat.

I saw more movement out among the trees. Of course, we had the automated antimissile lasers. They had been the first package we had set up. They could track a missile and zap it within microseconds, although how well they could track through the heavy canopy of the trees was a question I wondered about. Could they pick up a grenade at short range and destroy it? I doubted that.

Suddenly half the world lit up and a terrific roar shook the ground. My visor sensors overloaded and turned off. With my unaided eyes I saw that they had fired a barrage of rocket grenades at us, roaring in low to the ground, flat trajectories. Our antimissile lasers fired and blew away several of them in brilliant blossoms of flame.

Every sergeant tried to report in at once. The Skorpis were attacking around half the perimeter, charging forward into our guns.

And then they were hitting my sector, too. They came rushing out of the woods, firing and bellowing earsplitting battle cries. I grabbed my rifle and started shooting back. They were big, I could see that even at this distance, huge and heavily muscled with cat’s eyes that glowed fiercely in the light of the battle.

I ducked down for a moment and worked the antimissile override controls on my wrist. Depressing the lasers to fire horizontally, I started them sweeping the woods with their heavy beams. My troops knew enough to keep down, stay flattened on the ground. The Skorpis walked into those powerful beams as they advanced. I saw them sliced in half, heads vaporized, trees blasted into flame. They dropped down to their bellies; their advance stopped.

We peppered them with our grenades. I saw white-hot shrapnel shredding the ground were they lay. But they did not retreat. They inched toward us, crawling on their bellies, dying and being horribly torn up by our fire but still coming at us, inexorably, relentlessly, like an unstoppable tide.

And the alarm on my other wrist tingled. Glancing to my left I saw that the automated laser rifles in the gully had found something to shoot at. Whole squads of Skorpis were slithering down the gully, just as I thought they would. The attacks on our perimeter were merely holding actions designed to keep our attention away from the gully.

Merely holding actions. Humans and Skorpis were dying all along our perimeter. The forest was in flames now. Rockets whizzed through the scorching air. Explosions shook the ground. Laser beams flicked and winked everywhere in a crazy crossfire. Men yelled and screamed at the enemy, who bellowed and roared back at us.

And the main weight of their attack was slithering down the gully. They were past the screen of automated rifles now, thinking that they had put the gully’s defenders to rout. They were moving faster now, crawling on their hands and knees, almost to the point where Manfred and his ten would have to stop them.

I jammed my thumb on the stud that set off the mines. The whole gully erupted in a tremendous blast of flame and billowing dirt and smoke. I saw bodies hurled into the air, silhouetted against the flaming trees, and parts of bodies, too.

For a stunned instant everything went quiet. Absolutely still. Or was it that the shattering, overpowering roar of that explosion had simply deadened my ears?

“They’re coming at us again!” It sounded like Lieutenant Vorl, who was stationed halfway around the perimeter from where I was. And, sure enough, more Skorpis were pushing forward toward my position, staying low to avoid the heavy laser fire, but still advancing toward us.

“Fall back,” I said into my helmet mike. “Fall back and tighten up our perimeter.” With a smaller circumference to cover we could intensify our fire.

For what seemed like hours we inched back and the Skorpis crawled forward. There was no end of them. I saw hundreds of their bodies sprawled in death all around us, yet their comrades still pressed forward, relentless, unheeding. My rifle became too hot to fire; it just refused to work. I pushed it aside and drew my pistol.

“Piss on it,” muttered a trooper at my side.

I thought he was having trouble with his rifle, too.

“Piss on it,” he repeated, adding, “sir.”

And he demonstrated what he meant. With laser beams zipping scant millimeters over our heads, he wormed his penis out of his pants and armor and urinated on the coils of his rifle. Then he flattened onto his belly and resumed firing at the Skorpis.

“Cools the coils, sir,” he said, without taking his eyes off the advancing enemy. “That’s one advantage we men have over the women. Sir.”

So I pissed on my rifle and got it working again, feeling slightly embarrassed in the back of my mind but glad to have the rifle functioning once more.

We were being forced back toward the heart of our camp. The Skorpis were evidently willing to spend as many of their warriors as they had to in order to destroy us. This was not a battle of attrition; it was a battle of annihilation. Either we wiped them out or they wiped us out.

Like all battles, though, there came a lull. We had fallen back to a tight little ring around the camp. Most of our bubble tents had been shot to shreds and the antimissile lasers had taken several blasts, but the screens around the transceiver were holding up. So far. The fires that we had started among the trees around our original perimeter had mostly died away now, although the air was still filled with a smoky, woody redolence.

I called my lieutenants together to see how we stood. We met in a muddy crater blown into the ground by a rocket grenade. Casualties were serious, but our weapons were still functioning; we had plenty of spare power packs for them. We were almost out of grenades, though.

“Report our situation to the fleet commander,” I told Lieutenant Vorl. She edged away from the rest of us, opened up the wrist of her armor and started tapping on the keyboard set inside.

“The transceiver’s still intact,” I summed up, “but we can’t afford to retreat any further. They’re almost within hand-grenade range of the equipment now.”

“The screens will still protect the equipment,” said Lieutenant Quint.

“Yeah, but not us,” Frede grumbled.

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