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.
“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.