the glistening of water on armor… he saw them move… rifles lift…
“Hit them!” he yelled, and flung himself at the line. A shot popped into his leg
and he hit the barrel, shoving it aside, following armored arms to armored body.
He bore the man over, ripped for the mask while armored fists flailed, battered
his head. Rifles went off; bodies hit the ground about him. He scooped up a
handful of mud, Downbelow’s own armament, slammed it into armor faceplate, into
the breather intake, found a throat under the armor rings and kept after it
while shouts and Downer shrieks rang through the rain.
A shot went overhead and the man under him stopped fighting. He scrabbled in the
thick mud for the rifle, rolled with it and looked up into a gun leveling at his
face; he squeezed the trigger and slagged it before it aimed, the trooper
staggering under fire from another quarter, screaming in the pain of diffused
burns. Fire from behind, near the dome. He fired at anything in armor, heard
Downer shrieks.
Light hit him; they were spotted. He rolled again, fired for the light, no skill
at aiming, but it went down.
“Run,” a hisa voice shrieked at him. “All run. Quick, quick.”
He tried to get to his feet. A hisa seized him up and dragged him until another
could help, into cover by the dome, where his own men had taken cover. Fire was
coming back at them from the hill, the path which led to the landing field,
their ship.
“Stop them!” he yelled at whatever of his men could hear. “Cut them off!” He
managed a limping run, a little distance; shots hissed into the puddles about
him. He slowed as others of his men kept going, tried to keep going.
“You come,” a hisa shrieked. “You come me.”
He fired as he could, ignoring the hisa that wanted him to retreat to the woods.
Fire came back and a man of his fell, and fire started coming from the flanking
woods, hitting the troops, driving them to run again, and he limped after. The
troops had reached the hillcrest, disappeared over the shoulder of the hill; had
surely called for help, reinforcements, for the probe’s big guns to be trained
on that path to meet them the moment they charged over it. Emilio cursed
tearfully, used the rifle for a crutch, and some of his men kept going still.
“Keep low,” he yelled, and struggled further, with visions of the ship lofting,
of all the helpless thousands who waited by the images. The troops had distance
on them, and armor that protected them, and once over that hill…
They came up over it. Fire lit the dark, and most of his men flung themselves
down at once, squirming back to cover from a fire they could not face. He
crouched, came as far as he could, lay on his belly to look down from the hill
into the fire of the heavy guns. The ground itself began to steam downslope. He
saw troops regrouping against the probe’s lighted hatch, under an umbrella of
fire that laced the slope, beams steaming through the rain and boiling earth as
well as water. The troops could reach that safe haven; the ship would loft and
hit them from overhead… nothing, nothing that they could do.
Shadow flooded toward the field, behind the lines of rallying troopers, like
illusion, the pouring of a black tide toward that hatch. The troops silhouetted
in the hatchway saw it, fired… must have called the others; they started turning
and Emilio opened up fire on their backs, heart-chilled with the sudden
realization what it was, what that other force must be. He scrambled to his
knees, trying to get a shot at the troops in the open hatchway despite the beams
slicing the hillside. The dark flood kept coming over their own fallen, carried
the doorway, and suddenly gave way, retreating desperately.
Fire bloomed in the hatchway, spread and swept through the troops and the
attackers; the sound came, and the shock hit his bones. He sprawled in the mud
and lay there. Firing had stopped. There was silence… no more war, only the