If I could see it, certainly the Friendlies could see it, to say nothing of the Force-Leader of the patrol, himself. Obviously he was holding it under orders from his Headquarters, a good deal farther back behind the lines. For the first time I began to see some excuse for this unwelcoming attitude where Dave and I were concerned. He obviously had his troubles-including some superior officer back at Headquarters who would ask him and his patrol to hold such a place as this hill. I began to feel more kindly toward the Force-Leader. Wise, panic-stricken, or foolish his orders might be; but he was soldier enough to do his best to carry them out.
It would make a great story, his hopeless attempt to defend this hill, with no support on either side or behind him and the whole Friendly army in front. And between the lines of my writing, I could have my say about the kind of command who had put him there. And then I looked around the slope and saw the enlisted men of his patrol dug in and a cool, sickly feeling knotted my stomach right under my breastbone. For they were in this, too, and they did not know the price they were about to pay in order to become heroes in my newsstory.
Dave punched me in the side.
“Look there-over there-” he breathed in my ear. I looked.
There was a stir among the Friendlies hidden in the trees at the bottom of the hill. But they were clearly only picking up extra strength and grouping for an actual assault on the hill. Nothing would happen for a few minutes yet, and I was about to tell Dave so, when he jogged me again.
“No!” he said, low-voiced, but urgently. “Out there. Away out. Near the horizon.”
I looked. And I saw what he meant. Out there among the trees that finally met the sky, now turning hot and blue, some ten kilometers, or about six miles, off, there were firefly-like flickers. Little yellow flashes among the green and occasionally a little upward plume of something white or dark that dissipated on the breeze.
But no fireflies ever flickered so as to be seen in broad daylight like that, and at a distance of over six miles. They were heat beams we were looking at.
“Armor!” I said.
“They’re coming this way,” said Dave, staring fascinated at the flashes, looking so small and trivial at that distance. Flashes that were in reality swords of searing light, forty thousand degrees centigrade at the core, that could topple the huge trees around us as a razor blade might slice through a bed of standing asparagus.
They were coming on unopposed, for there were no infantry worthy of the name in their way to take them out with plastics or sonic hand-weapons. Missiles, the classic defense against armor, had been outdated nearly fifty years by counter-missilery advanced to the point where reaction speeds of half-light made their use on planetary surfaces impossible. They were coming on slowly, but unstoppably, burning out on principle any likely hiding spots for infantry they passed.
Their coming made our defense of the hill a mockery. For if the Friendly infantry did not sweep over us before the armor got here, we would be fried in our foxholes. It was plain to me-and plain to the men of the platoon as well, for I heard a little humming moan move along the hillside as the soldiers in the other holes spotted the flashes.
“Silence!” snapped the Force-Leader from his. “Hold your positions. If you don’t-”
But he had no time to finish, for, at that moment, the first serious assault of the Friendly infantry mounted the slope against us.
And a sliver from a spring-gun took the Force-Leader high in the chest, ju$t at the base of the neck, so that he fell back, choking on his own blood.
But the rest of the patrol had no time to notice this, for the assaulting Friendly spring-gunmen, wave on wave of them, were halfway up the slope to them. Low in their foxholes, the Cassidans fired back; and either the hopelessness of their position or an unusual amount of battle experience was paying off for them, for I did not see a single man who was paralyzed by combat fear and not using his gun.
They had all the advantage of it. The slope steepened as the top of the hill was approached. The Friendlies slowed and were shot down easily as they came closer. They broke and ran once more for the bottom of the hill. And once again, there was a pause in the firing.
I scrambled out of my foxhole and ran over toward the Force-Leader, to find out if he was still alive. It was a foolish thing to do, standing up in plain sight like that, Newsman’s cape or not; and I paid for it accordingly. The retreating Friendlies had lost friends and fellow soldiers on the hill. Now one of them reacted. Just a few steps short of the Force-Leader’s foxhole, something chopped my left leg out from under me and I went down, skidding, on my face.
The next thing I knew I was in the command foxhole beside the Force-Leader, and Dave was leaning over me, crowding the narrow space which also held two Groupmen, who must have been the Force-Leader’s noncoms.
“What’s going on…”I began, and tried to get to my feet. Dave moved to push me back; but I had already tried to put some of my weight on my left leg; and a tiger’s-tooth of pain drove through it, so that I slumped again, half-fainting, and soaked in my own sweat.
“Got to fall back,” one of the Groupmen was saying to the other, “Got to get out of here, Akke. Next time they’ll get us, or if we wait twenty minutes the armor’ll do it for them!”
“No,” croaked the Force-Leader beside me. I had thought him dead; but when I turned to look, I saw someone had set a pressure bandage against his wound, and released the trigger, so that its fibers would be inside the hole in him now, sealing apertures and clotting the blood flow. All the same he was dying. I could see it in his eyes. The Groupman ignored him.
“Listen to me, Akke,” said the Groupman who had just spoken. “You’re in command now. Got to move!”
“No.” The Force-Leader could barely whisper, but whisper he did. “Orders. Hold at all-costs-”
The Groupman evidently called Akke looked uncertain. His face was pale and he turned to look at the communications unit beside him in the foxhole. The other Groupman saw the direction of his glance and the spring-rifle across his knees went off, as if by accident. There was a smash and a tinkle inside the communications unit and I could see the ready light on its instrument panel go dark.
“I order you,” the Force-Leader was saying: but then the terrible jaws of pain closed upon my knee once more and my head swam. When my vision cleared again, I could see that Dave had ripped my left pant’s leg up above the knee and just finished setting a neat, white pressure bandage around the knee.
“It’s all right, Tarn,” he was saying to me. “The spring-rifle sliver went all the way through. It’s all right.”
I looked around. The Force-Leader still sat beside me, now with his side-arm half drawn. There was another spring-rifle wound, this time in his forehead and he was quite dead. Of the two Groupmen, there was no sign.
“They’ve gone, Tarn,” said Dave. “WeVe got to get out of here, too.” He pointed down the hill. “The Friendly troops decided we weren’t worth it. They pulled out. But their armor’s getting close-and you can’t move fast with that knee. Try to stand up, now.”
I tried. It was like standing with one knee resting on the needle-point of a stake and bearing half my weight on that. But I stood. Dave helped me out of the foxhole; and we began our limping retreat down the back way of the hill, away from the armor.
I had likened those woods earlier in my thoughts to a Robin Hood-like forest, in their openness, dimness and color finding them fancifully attractive. Now, as I struggled through them, with each step, or hop rather, feeling as if a red-hot nail was being driven into my knee, my image of the tree groves began to change. They became darkling, ominous, hateful and full of cruelty, in the fact that they held us trapped in their shadow where the Friendly armor would seek us out and destroy us either with heat beams or falling trees before we had a chance to explain who we were.
I had hoped desperately that we would catch sight of an open area. For the armored vehicles floating up behind us were hunting the woods, not the open spaces; and particularly out in the open knee-high grass, it would be hard for even an armored pilot to see and identify my cape before shooting at us.