“Confirm count of three Enemy, Commander,” came Zur’s telepathed message.
“Confirmed. No indication of additional Wasps or Leapers in the immediate area.”
The two forces considered each other warily. This would be the first actual confrontation between the Coalition of Insects and the Tzen Empire. Surprise attacks such as the original strafing mission or our ambushing the solitary Leaper were deliberately planned to favor the attacker and play into the defenders’ weakness. Now, for the first time, individuals of a roughly even number were squaring off for head-on combat, each side with an equal degree of preparedness or nonpreparedness, as the case maybe.
Although we had seen hundreds, even thousands of Wasps when we were strafing the nests, it was quite a different thing to face the Enemy from a short distance when they were awake, alert, and ready to fight instead of viewing them from inside a flyer’s canopy as they buzzed around groggy and confused.
They continued to stare down at us with those dead metallic eyes, occasionally shifting position and touching antennae as if in conference. Their bodies were a glossy ten feet in length, and in flight their wings spanned over twenty feet, presenting a formidable and not particularly vulnerable target.
My teammates were not idle. With a cold calmness, they warily made their preparations for battle. Ahk had opened half a dozen of his spring-javelins after first retreating to a position near the base of one of the towering trees. Grasping his flexi-steel whip in one hand, he began sticking the javelins in the ground around him, forcing one end deep into the soil. At first I thought he was attempting to prepare by having a ready supply of, missiles close at hand, a tactic that seemed unwise to me considering the extremely tough exoskeleton of the Wasps. Then he turned and drove two of the javelins into the tree trunk behind him, leaving them to jut into the air at an unlikely angle, and I saw his plan. He was erecting a maze of sharp spikes between himself and the Enemy-negating any chance of being taken by a sudden rush. It seemed there was still much I could learn from this campaign-scarred veteran.