“It’s only another hour or so until dawn,” Quint said. “According to Intelligence, the Skorpis almost always break off their attacks when daylight comes up.”
“And Intelligence has been a hundred percent on everything so far, haven’t they?” Frede countered.
“It’s the ‘almost always’ that worries me,” I said. “They seem willing to fight to the last man.”
“Theirs or ours?”
“Whichever comes first.”
A laser beam lanced by over our heads. A grenade exploded somewhere.
“They’re starting up again.”
Vorl ducked her head back into our conversation. “Sir, I’m having a difficult time raising the fleet. A lot of interference on every available channel.”
“Jamming?”
“Possibly. Or something’s wrong with the comm equipment.”
“Great,” I muttered. “Just what we need, to be out of touch with the fleet.”
More firing. But none of the sergeants were reporting in, so I assumed nothing major was developing. Not yet.
“How long can we sit here and hold them off?” Quint asked.
“As long as we have to,” answered Frede.
“Do you have something else in mind?” I asked Quint.
He gave me a curious look: part worry, part eagerness. “The troop’s morale is still high, sir. We’ve been killing those bastards all night long. But if we have to continue just standing here and taking it, morale will start to crumble. Especially if the Skorpis don’t break off their attack at dawn.”
“What are you trying to say?”
“I think we should counterattack them, sir. Battles are won by the moral factor as much as by attrition or maneuver. Hit back at them, run them off, scatter them and kill them. That’s what we should do.”
“You live longer on the defense,” Frede said. “Attacking troops take higher casualties than defending.”
“And we have no idea of how many of them are still out there,” Vorl pointed out. “We could be charging into millions of them.”
“That’s the key point,” I said. “We don’t know what we’re up against, how many of the enemy are facing us and what their intentions are.”
A trio of rocket grenades slammed in around us, throwing us against the crumbling sides of the crater.
“Here they come again!” shouted one of the sergeants.
No more time for discussions. The enemy solved our argument for us. We crawled out of the crater and headed for our individual squads, or what was left of them. The Skorpis were charging at us now, bawling out their hideous war cries and running straight into our guns. We fired and fired and fired, pouring laser beams into them, knocking them down, severing legs and arms and heads, killing them by the scores, by the hundreds.
And still they came at us. The sky began to lighten, although I barely noticed it, I was so busy fighting. And the clouds of dust and smoke obscured the coming dawn.
My rifle finally gave out, its power pack drained completely. There was no time to replace it. I yanked out my pistol and fired point-blank at the huge Skorpis warrior who was charging down on me. The beam burned through his armor and went completely through his body, yet his momentum was so great that his dying body hurtled into mine, nearly knocking me off my feet.
It was hand-to-hand now, and the Skorpis had tremendous advantages of size. My senses went into overdrive again, slowing down everything around me to dreamlike slow motion. I reached down and grabbed my combat knife, a deadly thirty centimeters of serrated blue steel. And suddenly I was Orion the primitive warrior once again, shooting and clubbing and slashing at the enemies around me. The world dissolved into a bloodred haze as I cut a swath through the swarming Skorpis.
They were huge, much bigger than I, but I was far faster. They seemed to move like sluggish mountains, arms the width of my torso, shoulders wider than two normal men, their catlike faces towering over me, contorted into snarling masks of rage and pain and hate. Their body armor, designed to reflect laser beams, was too light to stop my knife thrusts. I fired my pistol at their slitted eyes, blinding them if nothing else, and ripped at their throats or hearts with my knife.
They fought back, but I could see their massive arms moving languidly to aim their pistols, see their eyes shifting, see them stumbling and staggering as they tried to back away from me. In vain.
Four of them were charging at me, laser pistols sparking, making my armor glow. I shot one in the throat, then swung my beam across the second’s visor. I ripped open the gun hand of the third and kicked the fourth in the chest hard enough to make him stagger backward. The second one lifted his visor and I shot him through his cat’s eye, clubbed the one who was clutching his slashed hand with the butt of my pistol, then shot him in the base of his skull as he fell.
The fourth one threw his pistol at me; it must have been drained of power. I saw it revolving lazily through the smoke-filled air and flicked it away with the length of my blade. The Skorpis howled and leaped at me, clawed hands reaching for my throat. I sidestepped and fired a laser bolt into his neck. His head twisted and he landed on his face with a jarring thump. Before he could move I leaped on his back and drove my knife through his armor and into his heart.
I jumped to my feet and turned full circle. It was all over. There were no more of them to kill. I stood alone in the midst of their fallen bodies, knife dripping their dark black blood, pistol hot enough in my hand to scorch my flesh if I had not been wearing battle gloves. They lay all around me, dead or dying.
I blinked and turned again, every sense stretched to its utmost, every molecule of my body tensed for more danger, every atom of my being lusting for battle. It had been built into me; I had been created to kill. I swung around a third time, looking for more enemies. There were none.
A handful of my troops were left. Those still standing were gaping at me as if they were seeing an apparition. A hero. A monster.
Chapter 5
“They’ve gone,” said Lieutenant Frede, her voice hollow with fatigue and pain. She was on the ground, propping herself up on one elbow, her face smeared, her legs soaked with blood. And a pistol gripped so tightly in her hand that even her glove seemed ghost white.
“Dead,” muttered a standing soldier. “All of them.”
“You killed them,” Sergeant Manfred said. His right arm hung limply from his shoulder. That side of his face was burned black.
“We killed them,” I said. “Or drove them off.”
The sky was brightening from gray to pale blue. The sun would be up in a few moments. Gray smoke drifted in the air, acrid, stinging.
Frede rolled herself over to a sitting position. She was surrounded by bodies, ours and the more massive corpses of the Skorpis.
“You killed them,” she said, with real awe in her voice. “I never saw anything like it.”
The others who could still stand clustered around me. I was their savior, their hero. But also something of a maniac, a killing machine, a mindless merciless slaughterer. Hardened soldiers though they were, they were filled with admiration for my battle prowess, true enough, but also with something almost approaching fear.
“All right,” I said, trying to break their mood and get them back to normal, “let’s get the wounded tended to. Where’s Vorl? We’ve got to report to the fleet.”
“She’s gone,” said one of the soldiers. “Grenade.”
I pointed to the six least-injured men and women and told them they were the medical detail. Six others I put to checking out what was left of our camp, what supplies were undamaged. I myself tried to use the comm unit in my helmet to raise the fleet.
I got little more than static for my efforts. Which puzzled me. It could not be Skorpis jamming, not now that they were all killed or retreating. Unless they had set up automated jammers. That meant we would have to go through the woods searching-
“I hear you, Orion.” Aten’s voice was strong and clear. It seemed to be inside my mind, rather than coming through my earphones. “Pull down your visor.”
I did as he commanded, and his image took form before my eyes. He was still in his splendid white and gold uniform, but he looked grimly unhappy.
“A huge enemy battle fleet appeared out of subspace and surprised our fleet. Most of our ships were destroyed, the others have fled.”
“Fled?” I yelped.
“They were vastly outnumbered, Orion. They had to leave the area or be wiped out.”
“But what about us? What about our support?”
“You and your assault team are on your own until the fleet can regroup and return to Lunga.”
“How can you expect us-” But my question was too late. His image winked out. He was gone.
I slid my visor up and saw that my troopers were going about the tasks I had assigned them. None of them had heard my conversation with Aten. It was as if I had been in another dimension, walled off from them, while I spoke with the self-styled Golden One.
I let them work until we had sorted out our situation, keeping the news of the fleet’s abandonment to myself for the time being. Before anything else, I had to know what shape the troop was in.
The situation was bleak. Of our original hundred, forty-six had been killed and a further twenty-two so badly wounded that they expected to be sent back to the fleet as soon as a medical evacuation ship could reach us. Of the thirty-two remaining, all of us had suffered wounds of various severity, although we could still stand and fight. The only one among us to have gotten through the battle unscratched was Lieutenant Quint. I wondered about that.
Frede was in serious shape, both her legs smashed by a grenade. It would take a week or more for the automated medical regenerators to repair her shattered bones and rebuild the flesh. Others were just as bad off, and we did not have enough regeneration equipment to handle them all.
Sergeant Manfred’s shoulder was badly burned, but aside from a loss of blood he was in walkable condition. I went to the patch of ground where he lay, with two soldiers kneeling over him with a transfusion kit.
“Manfred, you are now a lieutenant,” I told him.
He glared up at me. “Sir, I don’t want to be a lieutenant. I’m a noncom.”
“You’re a lieutenant, Manfred, until I can get someone else to head Vorl’s squad. You will behave like a lieutenant and the squad will treat you like a lieutenant. End of discussion.”
Clearly unhappy, he mumbled, “Yes, sir.”
“How long will this transfusion take?” I asked one of the troopers.
She squinted at the readout numbers. “Nine minutes, sir.”
“Lieutenant Manfred, there will be an officers’ meeting in fifteen minutes, where my tent used to be. Report to me there.”
“Yessir.”
Both the troopers were grinning at him.
It was a pitiful officers’ meeting. Manfred’s shoulder and face were covered with spray bandages. Frede sat with her legs poking straight out, encased in regenerator packs up to the hips. And Quint looked strangely uneasy, as if he thought he ought to be wounded somewhere, too.
I had several nicks and burns on my arms, legs, and face, but nothing that required more than a smear of protein salve and a bit of time.
“What’s the supply situation?” I asked Quint.
He took a deep breath. “Not good, at the moment. Practically everything was destroyed in the fighting. We have enough food on hand for three days, max. We’re down to a dozen spare power packs. And the medical supplies are already stretched to the limit. We need more regenerators, especially. And fresh tents, cots, clothing, replacements for damaged body armor-”
“That’s enough,” I said. “I get the picture.”
“When does the medevac ship arrive?” Frede asked.
“It doesn’t,” I said.
“What do you mean? We’ve got wounded here we can’t even treat properly! They’ve got to be lifted back to the fleet.”
“There isn’t any fleet. They were jumped by a superior force and had to retreat.”
“They ran away?” Quint’s eyes went so wide I could see white all around them. “They’ve left us here and run away?”
“That’s the situation,” I said. “We’re on our own.”
It took several seconds for them to absorb the bad news. Frede and Quint stared at each other.
“Those goddamned lizards,” Quint muttered.
Frede looked down at her encased legs. “I never did trust them, the cold-blooded bastards.”
Manfred nodded to himself, as if he had expected nothing less. I was struck by the difference in looks between Manfred and the two lieutenants. The features of his face were sharper, harder. A hawk’s beak for a nose, narrow eyes of dark brown, almost black. Thick bristles of black hair, cropped close to the skull. Even his skin was different from theirs, swarthier, stretched tight over his jutting cheekbones.
“We’re going to die here,” Quint whispered.
Manfred almost smiled. “What’s the difference? If the fleet had taken us back they would’ve just put us back in cryo storage.”
Quint glared at him. “You can be revived from cryo storage, soldier, sooner or later.”
“Sure,” said Manfred, “when they’re ready to let us die for them.”
“That’s treasonous talk!”
“Hold on,” I said. “We’re not dead yet, and I won’t have my officers squabbling.” Turning to Manfred, I added, “Not even my new officers.”
“Sorry, sir,” he muttered. To me, not to Quint.
Frede asked, “If we only have a few days’ rations and no prospect of resupply from the fleet, what chance do we have?”
“There’s a Skorpis base on this planet,” I replied. “They have plenty of food there.”
“Raid the Skorpis base?”
“That’s suicide!” Quint insisted.
I gave him a wintry smile. “Would you rather die fighting or starve to death?”
Manfred said, “Sir, with all due respect, that Skorpis base is on the other side of the planet. It’ll take a helluva lot more than a few days to get there. What do we live on in the meantime?”
“We live off the land,” I said. “Our briefings said that the local vegetation and animals are edible. Some of them, at least.”
“What about our wounded?” Frede asked. “Some of them can’t travel.”
I said, “We can’t leave the wounded here. They’d starve to death. And the Skorpis will probably come back; they still want to knock out our transceiver, I’m sure.”
“Even without the fleet here to send us supplies?”
“The fleet might sneak a supply ship through, sooner or later. That’s what the Skorpis must be thinking right now. They’ll be back to finish the job.”
Frede scowled at me. “So instead of waiting for them to attack us here you want to take all of us halfway across the planet and attack them in their stronghold?”
“If we wait for them here we’ll be sitting ducks. I’d much prefer that they didn’t know where we are.”
Quint shook his head. “What difference does it make? We’re dead anyway.”
“That’s the spirit,” I said disgustedly.
The sudden whining hum of the antimissile lasers made all four of us look up. The lasers were powering up, swiveling, pointing skyward.
“Something’s coming in,” I said, scrambling to my feet.
The lasers fired, the crack of their capacitor banks sharp enough to hurt my ears. Seconds later we heard the dull rumble of an explosion, like thunder rolling in the distance. Another crack from the lasers, and then another clap of thunder, closer.
“This base is nothing more than a target now,” I said. “We’ve got to get out of here.”
None of them argued.
Battered, patched and bandaged, we gathered ourselves and what was left of our supplies and started the long trek through an unknown country toward the stronghold of our enemy. I led our vanguard, twelve of our least-wounded troopers. The twenty other relatively healthy men and women formed a guard around the flanks and rear of our wounded. All of us glided a meter or so above the ground on our flight packs. What was left of our supplies we carried along on the flight packs of our dead comrades.
We left their bodies at the base. It was a hard decision. Normally a troop cares for the bodies of its slain soldiers as well as possible, freezing them in cryo units when they can, in the hope that they can be repaired and eventually revived. Even if not, the bodies are treated with respect and eventually cremated with honors.
We could not bring the bodies of our forty-six dead with us; we simply did not have the strength for it. And besides, I figured that they would soon be cremated in a nuclear fireball. The Skorpis had tried to seize our base with their warriors and failed. Now they were determined to obliterate the base without risking further casualties.
Even as we moved the troop out into the dark, shadowy forest, the antimissile lasers fired again. And again. I wondered if the enemy was throwing that many nuclear missiles at our base, or if they were clever enough to send in dummy missiles, cheap unarmed rockets that gave our sensors the same signature as a nuclear-tipped rocket. Sooner or later our lasers would drain their power packs to exhaustion. Then a nuclear missile could be fired at us with impunity.
We started off near noon, local time, although the trees’ high canopy hid the sun from us. It filtered down in mottled patches of brightness, breaking the cool shadows of the forest as we wended through the massive tree boles, a caravan of battered, grimy soldiers in green armor floating across the ground as silently as wraiths.
Dwindling in the distance we heard the insistent crack! crack! of the lasers, firing at incoming missiles. It seemed to me that the firing grew more desperate as the hours passed. The enemy couldn’t be using up all that many nuclear warheads, I told myself. Most of those missiles must be decoys, dummies, meant to exhaust the system.
At last we drew too far away to hear the lasers. Either that, or their power packs had gone dry. If we had been there, and if we had fresh supplies coming in, we could replace the power packs and keep the base defended. But such was not the case.
It was nearly nightfall when we heard the vicious clap of thunder, sharp as a blow to the face. The shock wave of a nuclear explosion, palpable even at this distance. The sky behind us lit up and a low, grumbling, growling roar shook the air.
We all stopped, without a word of command or comment among us, and looked back. Through the trees, against the darkening twilight sky, we saw a mushroom cloud boiling up and up, bloodred in the light of the dying sun.
“There goes the base,” someone said.
“You were right,” Frede said. She was floating beside me, her encased legs dangling uselessly. “If we had stayed there…”
“Maybe the Skorpis think we did stay,” I said. “Maybe they think we’re all dead now and they’ve got nothing to worry about.”
Frede said, “Maybe.” But the tone of her voice told me that she did not truly believe that.
The nuclear blast set off a forest fire. We could see flames leaping through the distant trees. Thick dark smoke blotted out the stars. We hurried through the night, trying to put as much distance between us and the fire as possible. It was spooky gliding through the forest by the light of our helmet sensors. Every time I turned to look back over my shoulder the sensors would be momentarily overloaded by the bright flames; it was like glancing up at the sun.
Throughout that night we saw animals fleeing the fire. I thought I saw, out in those flickering shadows, creatures much larger than tree lemurs hopping and darting frantically to put as much distance as possible between themselves and the forest fire. Just as we were. The ground was rising, higher and drier as we advanced; the insects that had plagued us during our first nights on the planet seemed less annoying now. Or perhaps we had merely grown accustomed to their whining, bloodsucking company.
At last we came to a broad, swift-moving river. It surged quietly between steep banks, deep and wide, a good firebreak, I thought. We skimmed across the water and made camp on the other side. It was close to midnight and we were all exhausted.
I posted a light guard, expecting no dangers. Nonetheless, we made no fire in our camp. I took a quick meal of tinned rations, bland and almost tasteless, but steaming hot once the tin was opened.
“Hey Klon,” I heard a trooper whisper in the darkness to his buddy, “I’ll trade you my 24-C/Mark 6 for your 24-C/Mark 3.”
“What the hell for? They all taste like dust.”
“I like the Mark 3 better.”
“Lord God of Battles. Here, take the friggin’ thing. What the hell difference does it make?”
Another voice chimed in, “Hey, don’t you mutts know that these here rations have been prepared by the army’s best scientists to provide all the nutrition a soldier needs in his daily requirements? It says so right on the label.”
“He likes the Mark 3 better,” Klon growled disgustedly.
“He likes this crap?”
“Yeah, I like it. So what’s it to ya?”
“I dunno, Klon. What do you think?”
“You know what they say, pal-”
And a whole chorus of voices chimed in, “You’ve got to be born to it!”
They all laughed, and I wondered what made the punch line so funny to them.
After eating, I scouted around the area, glad to be on my feet again after a day of gliding in the flight pack. The guards were reasonably alert, and the forest seemed to offer a decent stock of small game. Even without the sensors in my visor I spotted several rabbitlike animals and a few smaller things nibbling on the foliage between the trees. There must be plenty of game here, even if those poor things running from the forest fire did not make it across the river. We would not starve.
Usually I need very little sleep. But the past night’s battle and the strain of this day were catching up with me. Satisfied that the camp was secure, I turned over command to Lieutenant Quint and looked for a spot to lie down.
And almost tripped over Lieutenant Frede’s encased legs.
Dropping to my knees beside her, I whispered, “I hope I didn’t hurt you.”
“Only a little,” she whispered back.
“How are you feeling?”