“Less than a minute now-filters down!-when I say ‘fire,’ grenadiers, take out your targets. God help you if you miss.”
There was a sound like a giant’s belch, and a stream of five or six iridescent bubbles floated up from the flower-shaped building. They rose with increasing speed until they were almost out of sight, then shot off to the south, over our heads. The ground was suddenly bright, and for the first time in a long time, I saw my shadow, a long one pointed north. The bomb had gone off prematurely. I just had time to think that it didn’t make too much difference; it’d still make alphabet soup out of their communications- “Drones!” A ship came screaming in just about tree level, and a bubble was in the air to meet it. When they contacted, the bubble popped and the drone exploded into a million tiny fragments. Another one came from the opposite side and suffered the same fate.
“FIRE!” Seven bright glares of 500-microton grenades and a sustained concussion that surely would have killed an unprotected man.
“Filters up.” Gray haze of smoke and dust. Clods of dirt falling with a sound like heavy raindrops.
“Listen up:
‘Scots, wha hae wi’ Wallace bled; Scots, wham Bruce has aften led, Welcome to your gory bed, Or to victory!’
I hardly heard him for trying to keep track of what was going on in my skull. I knew it was just post-hypnotic suggestion, even remembered the session in Missouri when they’d implanted it, but that didn’t make it any less compelling. My mind reeled under the strong pseudo-memories:
shaggy hulks that were Taurans (not at all what we now knew they looked like) boarding a colonists’ vessel, eating babies while mothers watched in screaming terror (the colonists never took babies; they wouldn’t stand the acceleration), then raping the women to death with huge veined purple members (ridiculous that they would feel desire for humans), holding the men down while they plucked flesh from their living bodies and gobbled it (as if they could assimilate the alien protein).. . a hundred grisly details as sharply remembered as the events of a minute ago, ridiculously overdone and logically absurd. But while my conscious mind was rejecting the silliness, somewhere much deeper, down in that sleeping animal where we keep our real motives and morals, something was thirsting for alien blood, secure in the Conviction that the noblest thing a man could do would be to die killing one of those horrible monsters.
I knew it was all purest soyashit, and I hated the men who had taken such obscene liberties with my mind, but I could even hear my teeth grinding, feel my cheeks frozen in a spastic grin, blood-Lust. . . A teddy bear walked in front of me, looking dazed. I started to raise my laser-finger, but somebody beat me to it and the creature’s head exploded in a cloud of gray splinters and blood.
Lucky groaned, half-whining, “Dirty. .. filthy fucken bastards.” Lasers flared and crisscrossed, and all of the teddy bears fell dead.
“Watch it, goddaminit,” Cortez screamed. “Aim those fuckin things-they aren’t toys!
“Team A, move out-into the craters to cover B.”
Somebody was laughing and sobbing. “What the fuck is wrong with you, Petrov?” Strange to hear Cortez cussing.
I twisted around and saw Petrov, behind and to my left, lying in a shallow hole, digging frantically with both hands, crying and gurgling.
“Fuck,” Cortez said. “Team B! Ten meters past the craters, get down in a line. Team C-into the craters with A.”
I scrambled up and covered the hundred meters in twelve amplified strides. The craters were practically large enough to hide a scoutship, some ten meters in diameter. I jumped to the opposite side of the hole and landed next to a fellow named Chin. He didn’t even look around when I landed, just kept scanning the base for signs of life.
“Team A-ten meters, past team B, down in line.” Just as he finished, the building in front of us burped, and a salvo of the bubbles fanned out toward our lines. Most people saw it coming and got down, but Chin was just getting up to make his rush and stepped right into one.