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.