“Captain? Is that you?”
“Yes,” I said, stating the obvious.
The trooper climbed up atop the broken edge of the wall. I recognized him: Jerron, the smallest man in the unit, often teased as the runt of the litter. He glanced behind him, and made a slight pushing motion with both his hands. I realized that his hands were empty. He was unarmed, not even a pistol on him.
I was about to ask him why he had no gun when a quartet of Skorpis warriors rose beside him. They were all fully armed. They pointed their rifles at me.
“Surrender or be killed.”
The nearest bit of cover was the wall on which they stood. Otherwise I was totally unprotected, standing out on the bare beach in the noontime sun, wearing nothing but a ragged pair of shorts. Not even much of a shadow with me.
I surrendered.
“They came in the second night you were gone,” Jerron told me as the Skorpis warriors marched us across the beach toward their base. “Just popped up in the middle of the ruins, outta nowhere. We never had a chance.”
So the Skorpis had found that the underwater tunnels led into the heart of the ruined city, I realized. They knew we were there and they used the tunnels to take the troop by surprise.
“How bad were our casualties?” I asked.
“It all happened so fast we never had much of a chance to put up a fight. The guys on sentry duty caught it. Manfred, Klon, Wilma.”
Manfred. The sergeant I had forced to become a lieutenant. A real lieutenant would not have been on guard duty. Manfred’s old habits killed him. Then I remembered Frede’s warning me that it’s not smart for a soldier to make friends. Manfred was hardly a friend, but I felt his loss as if it were my own fault.
“How long have I been away?” I asked. “I’ve lost track of time.”
“Four days, sir. The Skorpis knocked us off the second night you were gone, and then they’ve been waiting for you to come back ever since.”
“So now they’ve got us all.”
“Sorry to be the judas goat, sir.” Jerron looked fairly miserable as we walked, struggling to keep pace with the giant Skorpis’s strides. They were quite willing to nudge us with their rifle butts if they felt we were lagging behind.
“You’ve done nothing to be ashamed of, soldier,” I said. “This whole mission was a disaster from the outset.”
They marched us through their perimeter emplacements and into an open compound in the middle of the base, sealed off by electric fences, guarded by a dozen heavily armed warriors, surrounded by all the Skorpis on the planet. They were intent on keeping us from escaping, I could see.
Lieutenant Frede hurried to me as soon as the warriors pushed little Jerron and me into the compound.
“Orion! Captain! Are you all right?” There was real concern in her eyes.
“I’m unhurt,” I said.
“From what we had heard, the Skorpis had fried you six ways from breakfast.”
“They exaggerated their marksmanship,” I said.
Lieutenant Quint pushed through the group that had gathered around us. “They claim you killed half a dozen of them,” he said, with something like admiration in his voice.
“I didn’t stop to count.”
Frede said, “I don’t know what they intend to do with us, but it won’t be pleasant.”
“How have they treated you so far?”
“Oh, okay, by their standards. We’re stuck in this compound. No shelter. When it rains we get wet. We sleep on the ground. They feed us once a day, toward sundown.”
“I haven’t missed today’s feeding, then.”
Her expression grew more serious. “It seemed to me they were waiting for something. I guess they wanted to get you. Now they’ve got all of us.”
Quint added, “Now they can do whatever it is they intend to do.”
“Did you know there are other humans in this camp?”
“Others? No!” Frede said.
“I haven’t seen any,” said Quint.
“They seem to be scientists. And they’re working with the Skorpis.”
“Willingly?”
“I don’t know.”
“You there!” a deep Skorpis voice bellowed. “The one called Orion. To the gate. Now!”