Orion Among the Stars o-5 Read online

Page 4


  Finally we trudged back into the still-unfinished camp. I doubled the perimeter guard while Lieutenant Frede looked after the wounded and a burial detail froze the dead. Frede seemed puzzled as she applied protein gel to my burned shoulder.

  “Your wounds are halfway healed already.”

  “It’s a capability that was built into me,” I said.

  “But how? Biomedical science doesn’t know how to do that. If we did we’d make all our soldiers this way.”

  I shrugged as she sprayed a bandage onto my lacerated hand. “I suppose I’m a new model. The first of a new breed.”

  She gave me a suspicious stare.

  “Well, the important thing is that we beat them off,” I said, trying to sound cheerful.

  She still looked doubtful.

  Outside her medical tent I saw Sergeant Manfred waiting for treatment. His face was nicked and one arm roughly bandaged with a blood-soaked rag.

  “We beat them off,” I repeated to him.

  “They’re still out there,” he said somberly, with the flat assurance of a veteran. “That was just a probe. They’ll be back. Tonight, most likely.”

  Chapter 4

  Humans are diurnal creatures. We sleep in darkness and are active during the daylight hours. The Skorpis, my briefings had informed me, were descended from felines. They were nocturnal. All the more reason why our night landing made no sense. All the more reason to believe that Manfred was right; the next Skorpis attack would be at night.

  I wanted to be prepared for it, but I was caught on the horns of a dilemma. The more men I put to guarding our perimeter, the fewer were available to assemble the matter transceiver. Without the transceiver we could not get the heavy weapons and sensors that we needed to make our makeshift base reasonably secure from attack.

  We had one heavy weapon: the pair of antimissile lasers that, once assembled, could knock missiles out of the sky at ranges far enough to protect us from nuclear warheads. Or so the briefing tapes claimed. I shuddered at the thought of having nuclear weapons used against us. Apparently the high command had the same fear: hence the antimissile system. Our orders were to assemble it first, which we had very happily set out to do.

  I gambled and put as many of the troops on the assembly task as possible. That meant roughly half of them. More would simply get in each other’s way. The others guarded the perimeter while the construction job—heavy lasers and transceiver—hurried along.

  I walked the perimeter myself, studying the landscape, searching for whatever advantages I could find in the natural fall of the terrain. If I had not been so preoccupied I might have enjoyed the afternoon. The forest was actually quite beautiful, the trees tall and straight and stately, the sunlight filtering through the leafy canopy so high up above dappling the ground with patches of brightness. Colorful birds swooped among the trees; insects buzzed and chirped. I even saw a few small furry things scampering across the mossy ground and climbing up the tree trunks. Too small to be one of Intelligence’s tree lemurs, I thought.

  I saw no sign of the Skorpis or any other enemies. Not a spent power pack, not a footprint on the soft ground. Several of the trees were singed or scratched from shrapnel, but that might just as easily have been from our own firing as the enemy’s. For all the traces they left, the Skorpis might as well have been figments of our imagination.

  But I did see something that interested me. A broad shallow gully that ran from a nearby stream toward the center of our base. A natural pathway aimed directly at the heart of our encampment. A stealthy battalion could crawl along that gully unnoticed by soldiers on either side of it, especially at night with a firefight going full bore. It had to be guarded, blocked.

  Or maybe not. I began to wonder if the Skorpis had already scouted the area and noted the gully. Perhaps when they attacked—tonight, if Manfred was right—they would send a team to probe this sunken highway. If they found it undefended, they might send the main force of their attack along its length, to erupt deep inside our perimeter and shatter our defenses.

  That’s what I would do if I were in their place. Now how could I turn it into a trap?

  I started back toward our lines, my head buzzing with ideas.

  My three lieutenants were skeptical.

  “Invite them to push along the gully?” Lieutenant Vorl asked, her voice high with anxiety. “Let them penetrate our perimeter?”

  We were in my bubble tent, squatting on the plastic floor like a quartet of Neolithic tribesmen. Again I was struck by the physical similarities among the officers. Sandy hair, freckles, sky blue eyes. Their skin was a light tan, almost golden, as if blended from all the races of Earth. Vorl and Frede could have almost been twin sisters. Quint, my second-in-command, their brother.

  “We don’t have the manpower to hold the entire perimeter against them,” I said. “And we need another six hours before the blasted transceiver is operational. If we can trap a major part of their force and annihilate them, we might be able to break their attack and stay alive long enough to get the transceiver working.”

  “What about reinforcements?” Quint asked.

  I turned to Vorl, my communications officer.

  “No reinforcements,” she said sullenly. “I worked my request all the way up to the admiral, and the damned lizard turned us down cold.”

  “We have to hold on until the transceiver starts bringing in the heavy weapons,” I said, for about the twentieth time.

  “But inviting the enemy to infiltrate down that gully…” Lieutenant Vorl shuddered.

  “I agree,” said Quint. “It goes against standard tactical doctrine.”

  “Lieutenant Frede, what’s your opinion?” I asked.

  She shook her head, said nothing.

  “All right, then,” I said. “Three against and one in favor. The ayes have it.”

  They looked surprised, almost angry. But they took my orders without further grumbling. We spent the hours of twilight setting up our perimeter defenses and mining the gully. I placed a weak screen of automated rifles about a third of the way down the gully, just to give the enemy the impression that the gully was not totally unguarded. I did not want them to discover that they were in a trap until it was too late for them to escape. At the end of the gully, a scant fifty meters from the edge of the transceiver itself, I placed ten of the steadiest troops with Sergeant Manfred. If the enemy reached that far, they had to hold them until the rest of us could come to their aid.

  All work on assembling the transceiver had to stop when it became truly dark. We needed every soldier on guard, and I did not want our work lights to illuminate the area for the enemy. Not that they needed illumination. True to their feline heritage, the Skorpis could see quite well in darkness that would seem total to a human.

  At least we had the antimissile lasers up and working. If the enemy tried to take us out with a missile attack, we were ready for them. I hoped.

  Waiting was the toughest thing of all. The night was dark. No moon, and thick low clouds scudding across the distant twinkling stars. The biting insects swarmed at us again, making everyone miserable. Voices hooted out of the woods, night birds clacked and chirped with almost mechanical regularity. Now and then something would give out a weird, high-pitched howl.

  Nothing bigger than a tree lemur had been identified on Lunga, I reminded myself. But those howls sounded as if something quite large was making them.

  We scratched at our bug bites and grumbled and waited.

  I was hunkered down in a shallow dugout a few meters to the right of the gully, in full armor—dented legging and all. My rifle rested on the sill of upturned earth in front of me. My belt and webbing were studded with grenades and spare power packs. Pistol on my hip, combat knife in my boot. I thought again of the dagger that Odysseus had given me; I missed its comforting presence, but it would have been of scant use strapped against my thigh, beneath my armor.

  The sensors in my visor showed a tranquil forest. No sign of the enemy. I even
saw an actual tree lemur, or something very like one, climbing slowly down one of the trunks, staring in my direction with enormous eyes, and then working its way back up the trunk until it finally disappeared into the foliage high above.

  They have to attack tonight, I told myself. They want to knock out the transceiver before we get it operational. It makes no sense for them to wait until—

  “Some movement in fourth sector,” I heard a sergeant’s guarded whisper in my earphones.

  That was off to my left. I peered across the gully and into the trees out there. I could see nothing.

  But when I swung my head back I saw a flicker of movement among the trees directly in front of me. They’re out there, I told myself. Getting ready to hit us.

  What if they use nukes? I had pondered that question all day. The transceiver components were shielded; nothing short of a direct hit would damage them. Our body armor could absorb a lot of punishment and protect us from radiation. But a tactical nuclear grenade could kill most of us very quickly and allow the enemy to walk in and dismantle the transceiver by hand, if they wanted to. We had no defense against tactical nukes.

  Nor did we have any nukes of our own. Our mission was basically logistical, not attack. If anyone started throwing nukes around, it would be the enemy and we would be fried meat.

  I saw more movement out among the trees. Of course, we had the automated antimissile lasers. They had been the first package we had set up. They could track a missile and zap it within microseconds, although how well they could track through the heavy canopy of the trees was a question I wondered about. Could they pick up a grenade at short range and destroy it? I doubted that.

  Suddenly half the world lit up and a terrific roar shook the ground. My visor sensors overloaded and turned off. With my unaided eyes I saw that they had fired a barrage of rocket grenades at us, roaring in low to the ground, flat trajectories. Our antimissile lasers fired and blew away several of them in brilliant blossoms of flame.

  Every sergeant tried to report in at once. The Skorpis were attacking around half the perimeter, charging forward into our guns.

  And then they were hitting my sector, too. They came rushing out of the woods, firing and bellowing earsplitting battle cries. I grabbed my rifle and started shooting back. They were big, I could see that even at this distance, huge and heavily muscled with cat’s eyes that glowed fiercely in the light of the battle.

  I ducked down for a moment and worked the antimissile override controls on my wrist. Depressing the lasers to fire horizontally, I started them sweeping the woods with their heavy beams. My troops knew enough to keep down, stay flattened on the ground. The Skorpis walked into those powerful beams as they advanced. I saw them sliced in half, heads vaporized, trees blasted into flame. They dropped down to their bellies; their advance stopped.

  We peppered them with our grenades. I saw white-hot shrapnel shredding the ground were they lay. But they did not retreat. They inched toward us, crawling on their bellies, dying and being horribly torn up by our fire but still coming at us, inexorably, relentlessly, like an unstoppable tide.

  And the alarm on my other wrist tingled. Glancing to my left I saw that the automated laser rifles in the gully had found something to shoot at. Whole squads of Skorpis were slithering down the gully, just as I thought they would. The attacks on our perimeter were merely holding actions designed to keep our attention away from the gully.

  Merely holding actions. Humans and Skorpis were dying all along our perimeter. The forest was in flames now. Rockets whizzed through the scorching air. Explosions shook the ground. Laser beams flicked and winked everywhere in a crazy crossfire. Men yelled and screamed at the enemy, who bellowed and roared back at us.

  And the main weight of their attack was slithering down the gully. They were past the screen of automated rifles now, thinking that they had put the gully’s defenders to rout. They were moving faster now, crawling on their hands and knees, almost to the point where Manfred and his ten would have to stop them.

  I jammed my thumb on the stud that set off the mines. The whole gully erupted in a tremendous blast of flame and billowing dirt and smoke. I saw bodies hurled into the air, silhouetted against the flaming trees, and parts of bodies, too.

  For a stunned instant everything went quiet. Absolutely still. Or was it that the shattering, overpowering roar of that explosion had simply deadened my ears?

  “They’re coming at us again!” It sounded like Lieutenant Vorl, who was stationed halfway around the perimeter from where I was. And, sure enough, more Skorpis were pushing forward toward my position, staying low to avoid the heavy laser fire, but still advancing toward us.

  “Fall back,” I said into my helmet mike. “Fall back and tighten up our perimeter.” With a smaller circumference to cover we could intensify our fire.

  For what seemed like hours we inched back and the Skorpis crawled forward. There was no end of them. I saw hundreds of their bodies sprawled in death all around us, yet their comrades still pressed forward, relentless, unheeding. My rifle became too hot to fire; it just refused to work. I pushed it aside and drew my pistol.

  “Piss on it,” muttered a trooper at my side.

  I thought he was having trouble with his rifle, too.

  “Piss on it,” he repeated, adding, “sir.”

  And he demonstrated what he meant. With laser beams zipping scant millimeters over our heads, he wormed his penis out of his pants and armor and urinated on the coils of his rifle. Then he flattened onto his belly and resumed firing at the Skorpis.

  “Cools the coils, sir,” he said, without taking his eyes off the advancing enemy. “That’s one advantage we men have over the women. Sir.”

  So I pissed on my rifle and got it working again, feeling slightly embarrassed in the back of my mind but glad to have the rifle functioning once more.

  We were being forced back toward the heart of our camp. The Skorpis were evidently willing to spend as many of their warriors as they had to in order to destroy us. This was not a battle of attrition; it was a battle of annihilation. Either we wiped them out or they wiped us out.

  Like all battles, though, there came a lull. We had fallen back to a tight little ring around the camp. Most of our bubble tents had been shot to shreds and the antimissile lasers had taken several blasts, but the screens around the transceiver were holding up. So far. The fires that we had started among the trees around our original perimeter had mostly died away now, although the air was still filled with a smoky, woody redolence.

  I called my lieutenants together to see how we stood. We met in a muddy crater blown into the ground by a rocket grenade. Casualties were serious, but our weapons were still functioning; we had plenty of spare power packs for them. We were almost out of grenades, though.

  “Report our situation to the fleet commander,” I told Lieutenant Vorl. She edged away from the rest of us, opened up the wrist of her armor and started tapping on the keyboard set inside.

  “The transceiver’s still intact,” I summed up, “but we can’t afford to retreat any further. They’re almost within hand-grenade range of the equipment now.”

  “The screens will still protect the equipment,” said Lieutenant Quint.

  “Yeah, but not us,” Frede grumbled.

  “It’s only another hour or so until dawn,” Quint said. “According to Intelligence, the Skorpis almost always break off their attacks when daylight comes up.”

  “And Intelligence has been a hundred percent on everything so far, haven’t they?” Frede countered.

  “It’s the ‘almost always’ that worries me,” I said. “They seem willing to fight to the last man.”

  “Theirs or ours?”

  “Whichever comes first.”

  A laser beam lanced by over our heads. A grenade exploded somewhere.

  “They’re starting up again.”

  Vorl ducked her head back into our conversation. “Sir, I’m having a difficult time raising the fleet. A lot of
interference on every available channel.”

  “Jamming?”

  “Possibly. Or something’s wrong with the comm equipment.”

  “Great,” I muttered. “Just what we need, to be out of touch with the fleet.”

  More firing. But none of the sergeants were reporting in, so I assumed nothing major was developing. Not yet.

  “How long can we sit here and hold them off?” Quint asked.

  “As long as we have to,” answered Frede.

  “Do you have something else in mind?” I asked Quint.

  He gave me a curious look: part worry, part eagerness. “The troop’s morale is still high, sir. We’ve been killing those bastards all night long. But if we have to continue just standing here and taking it, morale will start to crumble. Especially if the Skorpis don’t break off their attack at dawn.”

  “What are you trying to say?”

  “I think we should counterattack them, sir. Battles are won by the moral factor as much as by attrition or maneuver. Hit back at them, run them off, scatter them and kill them. That’s what we should do.”

  “You live longer on the defense,” Frede said. “Attacking troops take higher casualties than defending.”

  “And we have no idea of how many of them are still out there,” Vorl pointed out. “We could be charging into millions of them.”

  “That’s the key point,” I said. “We don’t know what we’re up against, how many of the enemy are facing us and what their intentions are.”

  A trio of rocket grenades slammed in around us, throwing us against the crumbling sides of the crater.

  “Here they come again!” shouted one of the sergeants.

  No more time for discussions. The enemy solved our argument for us. We crawled out of the crater and headed for our individual squads, or what was left of them. The Skorpis were charging at us now, bawling out their hideous war cries and running straight into our guns. We fired and fired and fired, pouring laser beams into them, knocking them down, severing legs and arms and heads, killing them by the scores, by the hundreds.

 

    Earth Read onlineEarthMy Favorites Read onlineMy FavoritesPower Failure Read onlinePower FailureThe Dueling Machine Read onlineThe Dueling MachineThe Best of Bova Read onlineThe Best of BovaMars, Inc. - eARC Read onlineMars, Inc. - eARCThe Weathermakers (1967) Read onlineThe Weathermakers (1967)Test of Fire (1982) Read onlineTest of Fire (1982)The Starcrossed Read onlineThe StarcrossedThe Dueling Machine sw-3 Read onlineThe Dueling Machine sw-3Uranus Read onlineUranusOut of the Sun (1968) Read onlineOut of the Sun (1968)The Astral Mirror Read onlineThe Astral MirrorFaint Echoes, Distant Stars Read onlineFaint Echoes, Distant StarsMercury Read onlineMercuryThe Exiles Trilogy Read onlineThe Exiles TrilogyThe Rock Rats gt-11 Read onlineThe Rock Rats gt-11The Precipice (Asteroid Wars) Read onlineThe Precipice (Asteroid Wars)Carbide Tipped Pens Read onlineCarbide Tipped PensLaugh Lines Read onlineLaugh LinesFarside Read onlineFarsideMars, Inc.: The Billionaire's Club Read onlineMars, Inc.: The Billionaire's ClubThe Precipice gt-8 Read onlineThe Precipice gt-8Leviathans of Jupiter gt-18 Read onlineLeviathans of Jupiter gt-18Peacekeepers (1988) Read onlinePeacekeepers (1988)Jupiter gt-10 Read onlineJupiter gt-10Carbide Tipped Pens: Seventeen Tales of Hard Science Fiction Read onlineCarbide Tipped Pens: Seventeen Tales of Hard Science FictionThe Immortality Factor Read onlineThe Immortality FactorOrion and the Conqueror Read onlineOrion and the ConquerorMercury gt-14 Read onlineMercury gt-14The Multiple Man Read onlineThe Multiple ManNew Frontiers Read onlineNew FrontiersVoyagers II - The Alien Within Read onlineVoyagers II - The Alien WithinEmpire Builders Read onlineEmpire BuildersNew Earth Read onlineNew EarthThe Sam Gunn Omnibus Read onlineThe Sam Gunn OmnibusReturn to Mars Read onlineReturn to MarsMoonwar gt-7 Read onlineMoonwar gt-7The Green Trap Read onlineThe Green TrapRescue Mode - eARC Read onlineRescue Mode - eARCLeviathans of Jupiter Read onlineLeviathans of JupiterDeath Dream Read onlineDeath DreamTriumph (1993) Read onlineTriumph (1993)Foundation’s Friends Read onlineFoundation’s FriendsMars gt-4 Read onlineMars gt-4The Hittite Read onlineThe HittitePower Surge Read onlinePower SurgeApes and Angels Read onlineApes and AngelsOrion and the Conqueror o-4 Read onlineOrion and the Conqueror o-4Cyberbooks Read onlineCyberbooksOrion and King Arthur Read onlineOrion and King ArthurOrion in the Dying Time Read onlineOrion in the Dying TimeOrion Among the Stars o-5 Read onlineOrion Among the Stars o-5THX 1138 Read onlineTHX 1138Moonrise gt-5 Read onlineMoonrise gt-5Vengeance of Orion o-2 Read onlineVengeance of Orion o-2Orion in the Dying Time o-3 Read onlineOrion in the Dying Time o-3Mars Read onlineMarsTo Save the Sun Read onlineTo Save the SunThe Trikon Deception Read onlineThe Trikon DeceptionFaint Echoes, Distant Stars_The Science and Politics of Finding Life Beyond Earth Read onlineFaint Echoes, Distant Stars_The Science and Politics of Finding Life Beyond EarthFlight of Exiles e-2 Read onlineFlight of Exiles e-2Moonwar Read onlineMoonwarExiled from Earth e-1 Read onlineExiled from Earth e-1Saturn gt-12 Read onlineSaturn gt-12End of Exile e-3 Read onlineEnd of Exile e-3Survival--A Novel Read onlineSurvival--A NovelVoyagers IV - The Return Read onlineVoyagers IV - The ReturnOrion o-1 Read onlineOrion o-1Battle Station Read onlineBattle StationThe Aftermath gt-16 Read onlineThe Aftermath gt-16Voyagers III - Star Brothers Read onlineVoyagers III - Star BrothersSaturn Read onlineSaturnThe Winds of Altair Read onlineThe Winds of AltairTales of the Grand Tour Read onlineTales of the Grand TourGremlins, Go Home! Read onlineGremlins, Go Home!Rescue Mode Read onlineRescue ModeAs on a Darkling Plain Read onlineAs on a Darkling PlainThe Silent War gt-11 Read onlineThe Silent War gt-11Privateers Read onlinePrivateersThe Precipice Read onlineThe PrecipiceNebula Awards Showcase 2008 Read onlineNebula Awards Showcase 2008The Best of Bova: Volume 1 Read onlineThe Best of Bova: Volume 1Transhuman Read onlineTranshumanAble One Read onlineAble OneVoyagers I Read onlineVoyagers ITo Fear The Light Read onlineTo Fear The LightVengeance of Orion Read onlineVengeance of OrionTHE SILENT WAR Read onlineTHE SILENT WAR