A glance showed him Fluff belaboring a Maggot with a piece of pipe. “Aieee! Get down, you filthy beast!” Either pipe or galago-volume was enough.
Pistol, clinging to the air filter, was flailing at the mass with a length of chain. All he needed was a biker jacket. Beside him Fal fought tooth and claw, until Nym, from the trailer, tossed him a piece of reinforcing rod. Up on the trailer, all with bits of reinforcing rod, Nym, Doll, Melene and Doc were smashing Maggots away. These Maggots weren’t fighters. Just endless.
The bats, except O’Niel, had dived to war. O’Niel sat calmly on the middle of the trailer, took a drink from a bottle, then popped a wick into it. Then he held it upside down to soak, while flicking the lighter with his feet. Then, using both wings he tossed it. “Duck, you suckers!” Fire still caused pandemonium.
O’Niel shouted to Fluff, a lid in his mouth making him sound even more bog-Irish. “Ghet oop here and ohpen bhattles, damn ye!” With a leap, the galago complied.
The Magh’ could still overwhelm them, but only by sheer panic and numbers and the slipperiness of the ground. Nym came up with a new crowd-clearer. Some of the scrap brought for shrapnel in the expedient mines yielded a couple of huge nuts, which the big rat hastily strung onto ten feet of nylon, bitten from the roll. He scrambled forward over Chip’s head and onto the front edge of the radiator grill, where he clung by toes and tail. He whirled it around his head. He nearly got Pistol on the first arc, but then he got the angle right. The Maggots were mostly small and Nym kept the thing whirling at the height of the waving limbs. Knocking limbs off didn’t even slow the weapon down.
One of the whirling nuts howled, and that put the horn into Chip’s mind. He dropped the shovel and set the tractor going again, leaning on the horn. It brayed and brayed, as they began to slither and crunch their way forward through a flaming fleeing mob. The tank pump chose this moment to add its own drowning-baby shriek. Something about that seemed to frighten the Maggots even more.
And then . . .
They were through. Out on the far side. Rolling along the open Maggot-way. Nym dropped his makeshift flail and began cheerfully tossing insecticide bombs behind them.
“We did it! We did it!” shouted Siobhan. “Holy mother! I think we just beat more Maggots than the whole army ever has in any one battle!”
“No shields,” murmured Chip, wonderingly. “Imagine going to fight with no shields.”
“I haven’t got a shield,” said Ginny. “It didn’t stop me.”
It stopped everybody else on the tractor.
They stared at her openmouthed—except for Fluff, who jumped up on Virginia’s shoulder and put his long fluffy tail around her throat. “It is true! And I do not have one of these either. Bah, a true knight does not cower behind a shield!” He adopted a Napoleonic stance on her shoulder.
Chip shook his head. “You’re a loony. In fact, you are a pair of flipping loonies. It didn’t occur to me that you didn’t have shields. Everybody in the army has shields! I . . . forgot you were civs.”
“I’m not sure if that’s a compliment, or an insult,” Ginny said dryly.
“Au contraire! It is a revelation.” Doc leapt up on the engine cowling. His ratty beady eyes glowed with an inner fire. “You have shifted the entire paradigm of war.”
“Oh, put a sock in . . .” Pistol began.
Doc turned on Pistol. “You shut up! And listen for once, you fool.”
The astonished Pistol shut up. And everyone listened.
“Our thinking tends to operate within the bounds of a set of preconceived premises. Every now and again those premises are shown to be flawed, and then the entire structure built on them must be rebuilt.” The philosopher-rat cleared his throat and then continued with the dignity of a rat addressing the prestigious Shareholder’s Society for the Advancement of Science.
“The humans entered this war with one of the basic premises wrong. Their species has, for a long time now, fought with projectile, long-range weapons. They assumed that that was the way any civilized species would fight, if given the choice. They assumed that if their troops were unshielded the Maggots would use projectile fire. It was an incorrect premise. The Maggots bodies are their weapons.”