“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.