Steel World (13 page)

“She’s gone,” I said. “I’m not going anywhere. We’re on overwatch, and we’re staying right here.”

Carlos looked at me like I was crazy, but he put his rifle to his cheek and kept scanning for more targets. He was breathing so hard I thought he might hyperventilate.

“They tore her apart,” Carlos kept muttering. “I can’t believe it.”

“Shut up. Kivi will be fine. They’re probably reviving her right now back at camp. She’ll get to her bunk tonight before we do.”

The truth was, I didn’t want to think about it. I hadn’t been intimate with Kivi lately, but it was hard to keep your mind straight when your ex-girlfriend was dead at your feet. Sure, I knew she’d come back to life soon, but my emotions were running high anyway.

“It just tore her arm right off,” he continued. “Running around with it like it was some kind of trophy. Do you suppose that one was saving her arm? To show it off—or to eat?”

“Just shut up, Carlos.”

He finally did. His breathing slowed, and for the next minute or two, nothing big happened.

Then we heard stealthy steps behind us. I wheeled and almost fired but managed to stop myself in time.

Carlos didn’t manage to control himself so cleanly. He put a single pellet into the chest plate of Veteran Harris.

Harris wasn’t hurt, but he wasn’t pleased, either. He kicked Carlos in the butt with a steel boot and hissed at him to aim his gun
forward
.

I was surprised that he’d managed to get so close without alerting us. Wearing heavy armor and carrying a beamer, he was slower and louder than any recruit. He stepped beside me and aimed his rifle around the other side of the tree.

He glanced down at Kivi’s body.

“Let me guess,” he said, “Carlos here blew her arm off, right?”

“Negative, Veteran,” I said. “There were six saurians. They charged us and we shot down three, making them retreat. They were chasing this soldier. She died of her injuries.”

He glanced at me. “You’re telling me you fought off six juggers with two snap-rifles? Show me the bodies.”

Rather than arguing, I advanced and showed him the fallen raptors in the underbrush. He came close and stared.

“Regular saurians?” he asked.

“Raptors, sir. The smart kind.”

“Where are the juggers?”

“No contact yet, Veteran.”

He shook his head in confusion. He took pictures with his helmet and radioed them in. He made a report, but I couldn’t hear what he said.

Finally, he came back to us. “All right,” he said. “I want you to hold your positions for ten more minutes, then withdraw back to the wall. You did well here tonight.”

Then he left us.

About one minute later, Carlos stood up.

“Where are you going?” I demanded.

“Where the hell do you think I’m going?”

“We’re holding right here,” I told him. “I’m not leaving yet.”

He stood indecisively but then crouched down again with a growl of frustration.

“You want a promotion that badly?” he asked.

“I want you to shut up and follow the veteran’s orders.”

We waited the full ten minutes. The jungle was pretty quiet now. A few more bursts of fire had erupted at the nine-minute mark, followed by what sounded like a scream in the distance. But after that, it was quiet.

“That’s it,” Carlos said. He’d been pretty much staring at a counter on his tapper.

I lowered my rifle and began walking. We’d done our part. “Let’s get the hell out of here,” I said.

We took about three steps toward the walls, but that was as far as we got.

I thought later, looking back on it, that the enemy probably hadn’t been quite sure how many guns we had, or maybe they weren’t certain where we were. Possibly, they’d been getting ready to rush us and thought we were trying to get away.

Whatever the reason, as soon as we stood and tried to retreat, they charged.

Dozens came. There was a line of raptors in the lead, fast and vicious. I couldn’t even count them all. Behind them lumbered no less than eight juggers.

I knew it was over. I stood my ground and fired over and over. I held the trigger down until the gun got hot in my hand. Ignoring the pain coming through my gauntlets and my aching shoulder that was taking a hammering from the butt of my weapon, I never stopped shooting them.

I aimed at the raptors, knowing they would be the easiest to take down. I directed my fire at a target until it fell thrashing and screeching, then swung my weapon to the next. I brought down three and was just lining up my fourth when a pair of jaws crunched down on my right arm.

I’d thought I was ready for this, but I don’t think anyone ever will be. The shock of it was intense. It wasn’t even pain exactly, just a weird, nervous pinching feeling: Like I had a crick in my neck or something.

Using my left hand I tried to line up the rifle again. But long before I managed that, something ate my knee.

One second I had two legs, and then I was down and I saw a creature running off with one of them dangling from its mouth.

I made some hoarse sounds then. They were loud in my helmet.

I looked back, craning my neck. I saw Carlos. There was no point in running, but Carlos was going for it anyway. I could hardly blame him.

At least for him, it was quicker. A jugger ran him down and took his head and shoulders right off, chewing and shaking. He was dead in a second.

I wasn’t so lucky. The raptors were all over me, and they didn’t make it quick.

I know for certain that no matter how long I live, no matter how many times I die, I’ll never forgive those dinos for eating my guts out while I watched.

-9-

I woke up gasping for breath. It had been a dream—it
had
to be—a desperate, horrid dream. A night-terror caused by landing on this strange world.

I looked around like a drunken man. I could barely process what I was seeing.

“Get him up, get him up!” shouted a bio. She was gesturing for an orderly—another lucky recruit.

Arms grabbed mine and hauled me to my feet. I was pushed naked off the hard surface I’d been lying on. I staggered, and almost fell onto my face. I managed to stand, but my feet felt like rubber and my head was swimming.

“Reload, stat!” the bio shouted. She reached up and spread my squinting eyes open one at a time, looking into each for a fraction of a second.

“Forget about him, he’s fine,” she said.

The orderly let go of me, and I was left to stand on my own. I hadn’t even realized the guy had been holding me up. I looked down and all around me. I was still naked, and for a few seconds, I didn’t know why. I didn’t know what was going on—I barely knew who I was.

I stared at the bio specialist for a second. I thought I knew her… Yes, I did. She was Anne Grant, the specialist who’d led me on my first ill-fated adventure on Steel World.

“I know you,” I mumbled. “You hate me, don’t you?”

Grant didn’t even look at me. She was either too busy to talk or she just didn’t care.

“Sorry,” the orderly said to me over his shoulder. “We can’t afford a bed right now.”

Grant was working some kind of device. It didn’t look like anything I’d ever seen before. It was like a big furnace, but she was shoving some kind of platter inside of it. Could that be the bed I’d thought I was lying on?

That furnace-like
thing
…it had to be the revival machine. Only, it wasn’t exactly a machine. Not in the sense that I understood machines. The inside of it was like a mouth fleshed with pink, brown and gray mottled surfaces that reflected light wetly. It resembled a big, alien mouth.

Or,
I thought to myself,
a womb.

I shuddered. I was sickened and disoriented. It had finally fully dawned on me that I’d died and been returned to life by this strange thing they kept in a bunker. The raptors really
had
eaten me. Somewhere, out in that hellishly hot jungle, they might even be chewing still, fighting over scraps of my meat.

I gaped at the machine that had returned me to life. The surface of it was metal and the exterior had normal-looking controls. Touch screens glowed and indicator lights flickered. But that mouth-like opening showed that the interior was very different. It contained some kind of organic technology I couldn’t begin to understand.

“Another one’s coming through,” said Specialist Grant. “Did you reload the capsule? I want no rejects, we haven’t got the time.”

“I reloaded everything,” the orderly said.

“If this one screws up and comes out with missing organs, Garth, it’s your ass.”

“It won’t, Specialist,” said Garth. He turned and saw me, still standing there like a drunk wandering the street. He pointed behind me and then went back to his work.

I turned, following his gesture. There was a pile of uniforms and weaponry in one corner of the room. I took a light trooper suit and began to pull it on clumsily. The suit reformed itself to fit me even as I pressed my limbs into it.

Before I could pick up a weapon, several more bio specialists and a primus rushed into the room. They ignored me and began demanding counts from the operators.

“I’m busy,” Grant snapped over her shoulder.

“Not too busy to answer a question or two, I hope?”

Grant glanced back and saw the primus. “Sorry, sir. We’ve had over a hundred casualties in the last forty minutes. We can’t keep up.”

“Organization, Specialist. That’s the key.”

“Yes, Primus.”

I grabbed a snap-rifle and checked the magazine. It was fully loaded. I left the revival chamber, walked unsteadily down a long hallway and passed the guards outside. I left the bunker and headed back into the war.

Standing outside, I heard distant rumbling sounds. There were flashes in the sky, and the air smelled of burning things.

I struggled to close my visor. My fingers felt numb and rubbery. They tingled a little as if they’d been asleep. I pushed that thought away.

I didn’t want to think about what had just happened to me. The idea of being reconstructed and revived from a data chip had sounded great, but the reality of it was chilling. Was I really
me
anymore? My flesh—the body I’d lived within all my life—that was still out there in the jungle somewhere. Alien theropods were digesting parts of me in their stomachs. What was this clothing of meat I found myself residing in now? This vessel of muscle and bone reconstituted from base chemicals? How could that be
me
?

I closed my eyes for a second and then opened them again, taking deep breaths. A fist socked my shoulder a second later jarring me out of my mood.

“Hey, big buddy,” Carlos said, “way to get us eaten out there!”

“Yeah,” I said, “sorry about that.”

Carlos looked at me in concern. “I don’t recall ever hearing an actual apology out of you before. Are you okay?”

“No.”

He nodded, staring at me.

“First recycle, right?” he asked. “You’re thinking too much. That’s what it is. Well, I have the solution for that. Harris wants both of us up on the walls. Right now.”

That got me back into the game. I frowned at him. “We’re supposed to have a break. Standard operating—”

“That’s all out the window. What? Did you think you signed on with a union shop when you thumbed your way into Varus? We’re here to do or die—over and over again.”

I followed him toward the walls, toward the northern section where our unit was stationed. As I walked, more things were coming at me, as if they’d been shrouded in mist before. My newly-reknitted brain wasn’t perfect yet. I recalled from the training I’d gotten that a revive often left a soldier in an altered state of mind. Sometimes, a newly-revived man even had hallucinations.

There was a battle going on nearby, I was sure of that. I could hear it—and with every passing moment I understood more of what was going on. At first, I’d only been remotely aware of the hammering fire and flashing lights overhead. The smell of smoke and burnt flesh grew, however, until it became a stink in my nostrils. My visor was closed now, but the odor was trapped inside. I was pretty sure it had been there all along, but I hadn’t noticed.

The noises intensified as I approached the walls. I wasn’t sure if that was because my senses were improving, or if the battle had shifted into high gear. I guess it didn’t matter which it was because I was in the middle of this fight again whether I wanted to be or not.

“You two!” shouted Veteran Harris, spotting us. He was standing at the base of the northernmost tower. I remembered when I saw it that we’d spent hours here setting up a weaponeer’s gun emplacement at the top.

“Get your asses up the stairs and onto that wall. Stay out of the tower, that’s for useful people who don’t just wander around getting themselves eaten by overgrown lizards. I want you on the ramparts. If you see something coming out of the trees with scales on it, punch it full of holes.”

“Yes, Veteran!” shouted Carlos. He rushed up the steps.

I stared after him. That wasn’t like the Carlos I knew. Since I’d met him, he’d been reluctant to fight. Now, there was a new fire in eyes.

Harris watched the two of us, and chuckled. “Bad death, eh?”

“Yeah,” I said. “My first.”

“Ah… Didn’t know you were a virgin! Well, we’ve given you a second chance. Make Legion Varus proud, boy. Get up there and shoot as many lizards as you can!”

I looked at him for a second. Our eyes met.

“Veteran Harris, I’m sorry I killed you back on the ship. I just lost my temper.”

“That’s all forgotten,” he said. “But I can see now that you know what it means to die. It’s not fun, is it?”

“No. And I don’t want to do it again.”

He came closer and peered into my face. “You haven’t gone all soft on me now, have you, McGill? Back on the ship, you were the one with fire in his eyes. Now Carlos looks like more of a man than you do.”

“It wasn’t his first time,” I said, thinking about it.

Harris nodded. “That’s right. It wasn’t. Now you know why we kill most of the recruits during training. A man like Carlos, he’s experienced death. He’s not contemplating some metaphysical mind-fuck the way you are right now. He’s up on the walls, killing lizards for revenge. That’s just where the legion wants him.”

I looked up at the walls, and I saw Harris was right. Carlos was in the fight, but I still hadn’t moved.

For the first time, I knew something was wrong with me. I was weak right now. They might have called it “shell-shocked” in an earlier time. I suspect my state of mind was even worse than that of men who’d been injured and driven half-mad by combat. I was all those things, but I’d also been forced to consider my place in the universe at the same time.

“Listen, McGill,” said Harris, still staring at me with those hard, hard eyes of his. “You’ve got to shake it off. We’re in trouble tonight. There aren’t supposed to be so many lizards out there. The big ones and the small ones are working together. That’s when they’re the most dangerous. They have both brains and power when they fight side by side.”

“What about that thing I killed? That alien wasn’t from Cancri-9.”

“That’s an unconfirmed report. But don’t worry, I passed it up. Command will take care of it, if there’s anything that needs to be done. Now, are you ready to fight or not? I need every man I have up on that wall.”

I nodded, and stared back at him. I squeezed my rifle with both hands. “Yeah,” I said. “I want to kill lizards. I want to kill all of them.”

Harris laughed and thumped his steel-gauntleted hands together. “That’s what I want to hear. Get up there with your comrades. Let me see some of the crazy you showed me during training!”

“Will do, Veteran!” I shouted, feeling new purpose.

I turned and rushed up the steps. I might not have been as eager to go as Carlos had been, not yet, but I was into it now. My mind was closer to operating the way it should.

The battle was in a lull when I reached the top. I took a spot next to Carlos and aimed my weapon into the night. I’d decided I was going to get some vengeance tonight.

I thought to myself that I’d probably never had a real goal of substance in my entire life. Something I wanted to do more than anything else—something that would make me growl with satisfaction when it was achieved.

Now, I had two burning desires: The first was to stay alive. The second was to kill these scaly monsters, big and small. I wanted to make a heaping pile of their bodies at the bottom of the wall, to watch them squirming and dying.

“It’s quiet right now,” Carlos whispered. “But it won’t last. They say they’ve been coming in waves for the last hour.”

“How many have you killed?”

“Two or three. It’s hard to tell when everyone is shooting at the same saurian. Who got the kill-shot? I’m not always certain.”

I nodded. I wanted to get kill-shots. Everyone did.

After ten tense, quiet minutes the smoke had time to clear. I could see with my night vision visor the enemy dead were already piled at the bottom of the wall. Carlos hadn’t been kidding about the numbers. It looked like a saurian migration was underway, and we were directly in their path.

The quiet vanished moments later.

“Ready up, people!” Veteran Harris said in my helmet. “Don’t spray,
aim
. Finish your target before choosing a new one. If they get to the top of the wall, stand your ground. We’ll send reinforcements to your location. Don’t let them breach our line and get inside.”

These last words made me frown in my helmet.
If they get to the top of the wall?
How were they going to do that?

Then they came at last, a vast rushing mass of bodies, and I soon got my answer.

I fired and fired, reloading and firing some more. The first rank consisted of juggers—big bastards, up to twenty feet tall. When they reached the wall, they leapt and snapped at the men at the top. Now and then they got lucky and managed to pull a screaming legionnaire over the side and down to a quick death.

I aimed for the eyes, as the mouth and the huge bony heads were unaffected by my chattering light gun. It was our heavy troops with their more powerful weapons who saved the day. Their beam weapons slashed and burned the saurians.

As I watched, I learned how to use heavy trooper weaponry against such a massive foe. We’d never been trained with anything better than a snap-rifle, so I found this demonstration of firepower to be instructive.

The beam weapons emitted a lance of force that shimmered and twisted with visible light. Like swords that were twenty feet in length, they reached out and sliced away hunks of flesh from the enemy.

I’d done this sort of thing in games, but it hadn’t translated well. In real life that these weapons had to be handled with care. Any touch could tear a hole in a neighboring soldier. Each heavy trooper had to be fluid in motion, almost as if he was fencing with his energy lance.

They stabbed and thrust upward in most cases. This burned a hole in the jugger, then, as they moved their arms up, the monster was eviscerated. Guts poured out in a torrent onto the stacked dead.

“These can’t
all
be pissed-off miners!” Carlos shouted into my ear. “What the hell are we into?”

“Just keep firing,” I said, “aim for the eyes, it’s the only thing we can do that will affect them.”

When the juggers were beaten back in a ragged, retreating line, we thought we’d won, but then the next wave hit.

A line of raptors had snuck up behind their massive cousins. These smaller, smarter lizards had been busy while we struggled with the juggers. They were setting up devices of some kind—tripods with cables and coils underneath.

I realized in an instant what was going on.

“Duck!” I shouted.

It wasn’t a moment too soon. Gouts of energy burned the air, impacting the walls and any man who was still firing his weapon over the battlements. The heat was so great that the beams caused anything they touched to combust into flames.

Men and women fell, struggling all around me. They curled up and died, shivering and wreathed in flame. Even the walls themselves weren’t immune. The puff-crete was tough, but the enemy weapons were powerful. Scorch marks appeared everywhere, and chunks of our walls began popping in a series of miniature explosions.

“Keep down, squad!” I heard in my helmet. It was Veteran Harris. “Those are mobile batteries. I don’t know where they got them, but up close like this they’ll create such a temperature difference between anything they hit and anything they miss they’ll blow it apart.”

“You think they can take down our walls?” Carlos asked me, as we hunkered down behind the battlements.

They fired another volley before I could answer the question. The second wave of beams that came at us was narrower in focus. Instead of splashing heat and flame over everything, it punched hard with rays of energy three feet wide. The burning streaks drilled fiery holes in our walls and vaporized screaming troops on the inside. I looked up and saw chunks of smoking puff-crete pop overhead, showering me with rubble.

“If they’re allowed to keep firing, I’m sure they will,” I said.

“Okay,” Veteran Harris said again in my suit radio. “I have new instructions. When the big guns on the towers open up, every recruit is to get up and pepper the enemy gunners with fire. They’ll be distracted, don’t worry. All right, wait for it…wait for it…”

He didn’t have to tell us when the big weapons went into action. We couldn’t miss it. Up until now, the heavy weapons in the towers had stayed silent. Perhaps our commanders had decided to hold them in reserve to surprise the enemy when they were needed.

This was the moment, apparently, that they’d been waiting for. Every weaponeer rammed his heavy cannon out a gun port from the tower and unloaded.

All around me, recruits were standing and firing. I joined them. It was nice to be important again. The heavy troops in their armor stayed hunkered down. They weren’t armed with the optimal weaponry for distant, soft targets. That was the role of recruits with snap-rifles.

Stricken with withering counter-fire, the enemy gun crews were quickly taken down. Those that survived left their weapons and fled into the forest.

The counter strike was successful, but it was costly. Many of those who participated were burned to death. Their bodies were everywhere, all along the wall tops. Many had fallen to lie in heaps on the ground behind the walls, as well.

But we’d won the day. A ragged cheer went up when the firing stopped. The smoke cleared, and we saw dawn was just touching the sky with pink light.

I looked at Carlos, and he grinned back. We were overjoyed, if only because we were still alive.

“VARUS!” roared a voice. A thousand other throats joined in. I did the same, swept up with emotion.

-10-

Later on, when the battle quieted, I slumped down and fell asleep at my post. This was far from unusual. At least half the troops on the wall were sleeping by midday. We were exhausted. The lizards hadn’t come since dawn, but there had been an endless amount of work to be done.