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.