Harmony and reason were notably absent.
1
A small plane rose slowly, her twin airscrews biting the thicker-than-earth air. The colony—mankind’s brave leap into the future—had meant that they had to live in the past. Technology had to be self-sustaining without the interreliant industries of Earth. Some things had gone back a long way—like the propeller-driven aircraft.
Conrad Fitzhugh looked out through the hole in the rear fuselage where the rear door had once been. There was smoke on the southern horizon, where the front lines lay. They’d taken Van Klomp’s plane for a look. The alien invaders’ scorpiaries had spread their red spirals, twinkling behind their force fields, all the way to the Arafura Sea.
Fitz pulled his gaze inward. He’d see the war front soon enough from a lot closer. He looked nostalgically at the battered little aircraft, and at his fellow sky divers. This would be the last jump for most of them. Bobby Van Klomp had finally gotten the go-ahead to form a paratroop unit. Collins and Hawkes were on a final pass from OCS before being posted to the front. Young Cunningham had just gotten his call-up papers. And Conrad had finally decided to join the next intake at OCS in three weeks’ time, despite Candice. He’d have to explain to her tonight. He’d already booked a private table at Chez Henri-Pierre.
He tightened his harness. One of the best things about skydiving was that it stopped him thinking about her, at least for a while. Every man needs a rest from confusion.
* * *
Confusion, smoke, dust and fear. And a dead twitching thing, ichor draining from the severed chelicerae to mingle with the blood in the muddy trench. Pseudochitin armor couldn’t cover the ‘scorps’ joints. And, once they’d learned to operate within the constraints of a personal slowshield, none of the Maggots, not even the ‘scorps, could match rat speed. But there were always so many of them.
Ariel twitched her whiskers and fastidiously began to clean them. All the Maggots here were dead. So were the human troops.
Another rat sauntered across the trench, pausing to rifle a dead second lieutenant’s pockets. He shook his head glumly at the pickings. “I’ faith, these whoreson new officers aren’t any better than the last lot. Poorly provisioned. What’s a rat to loot in such poverty?”
“You could try looting a Maggot, Gobbo,” said a plump little rat leaning against a sandbag stack, picking her teeth with a sliver of trench knife.
Gobbo grunted. Shoved a few things into his pouch and tossed the rest. “Even thinner pickings, methinks, my little Pitti-Sing.”
The plump little rat considered Gobbo from under lowered lashes. Gently arched her long tail. “Of course, if it is less thin pickings thou art after, I wouldn’t try a Maggot,” she said archly.
A rat peered out from a bunker. A particularly long-nosed rat with a rather villainous cast to one eye. “Zounds! ‘Tis all done then? I fought them off bravely.”
Ariel and the others snickered. “In every doughty deed, ha, ha! He always took the lead, ha ha!” she caroled. No sensible rat wanted to fight Maggots, but Dick Deadeye took discretion to the ridiculous.
Deadeye drew himself up. “I was foremost in the fight!”
Ariel snorted. “The first and foremost flight, ha, ha!” she said, showing teeth.
Deadeye certainly wasn’t about to ruin his reputation for staying out of trouble by rising to the bait from this particular rat-girl. Ariel might be smaller than most, but she made up for it with pure ferocity. He took in the scene instead. The dead lieutenant, with his turned-out pockets, the several dead human grunts, a dead ‘scorp and the body parts of several more of the aliens. “Methinks we’d better send a runner back to let them know we need human reinforcements.”
Rats had no problem with Deadeye’s being a coward. It was his being a brown-noser that was going to get him killed. “Art crazed?” snapped Ariel, irritably. “‘Tis fully two hours to grog ration. What need have we to alert them before ’tis needful? They’d make us work.”
Gobbo nodded, sauntered over to Pitti-Sing and leered down at her. “Methinks you can hang me up as a sign at a brothel, before I do that, eh, wench?”