Steel World (40 page)

I thought about that. With water in my hand and cool air blowing in my face, I found I was able to get my mind working again. Whatever had come over me seemed to be fading.

“Okay, I’ll try,” I said. “What about the orderlies that are accusing me of murder?”

He got up and touched my shoulder. “Just let me talk to them. I have a good relationship—better than most. They see lots of strange things on the job. They know when to clam up for the good of the team.”

He left me then, and I wished him luck in my head. I thought about what he’d said. Yes, I could imagine the orderlies saw
lots
of strange things in Legion Varus.

I got up, swayed for a moment, then picked up my helmet and snap-rifle. I began slowly walking up to the surface. I could hear the distinctive sounds of battle now. I had to get back to my unit.

I had high hopes that Specialist Matis would convince the orderlies to drop the whole thing. But I had the feeling that wasn’t going to fix all my problems. I’d burned too many bridges with too many people.

And many of them, it seemed, were out to burn me in return.

-30-

Once the juggers started coming, it seemed they would never stop. They came in waves of about forty beasts each time. I wasn’t up top for the first wave, which was easily repelled. But by the second wave, they seemed to be getting smarter. They came in every opening in the walls at once, not just randomly without coordination.

It took a lot of firepower to take even a single jugger down. By concentrating from our entrenched positions, we were able to do it easily when they came through one at a time. By the third wave, they were charging in every breach at the same time, running full speed. The first one or two monsters went down in a hail of fire, but the next ones scrambled over the dead and rushed forward. The piling bodies even seemed to help them, providing more cover for the next group.

I was there for the third wave—the one that reached our lines. It was strange to watch our positions being overrun. They were right on top of us, blotting out the twin suns for a moment of lavender shade. Up close, my snap-rifle wasn’t much good. I could put out an eye, or hammer away until I destroyed a monster’s gullet so thoroughly it couldn’t breathe and died from catastrophic blood-loss, but really, it was the weaponeers that did most of the killing.

A weaponeer name Lund was nearby, protected by a fire team of five recruits, including Kivi and me. We were there to distract as much as anything else. When the juggers overran us, dipping down their massive jaws to snatch up and chew, I tried to get a big golden-scaled monster’s attention, but failed.

Kivi hammered rounds into the thing’s face, tearing apart a huge flaring nostril that fountained blood. She was next to me one second—and then she was gone. She’d been eaten while I’d survived.

I fought harder for a while after that. For some reason, every time they killed a friend I became a little crazy for a few minutes. Even though I knew the dead would live again, I was still angry.

Then the next snapping set of jaws came down. I was lying on my back now, staring up at four juggers with alien, pitiless eyes. Their tails lashed excitedly and their jaws dripped gore. They’d torn apart the recruit they’d managed to snatch up out of the demolished building we were sheltering in and were now returning to the spot, eager for more.

When the jaws came down for me, I was firing, of course, but the chattering rifle didn’t seem to be having much effect. At the last moment I thrust my rifle up into the beast’s mouth. I didn’t know what else to do. It wasn’t designed to have the killing power it needed to penetrate that much bone.

The jaws snapped shut early and the huge head withdrew, taking my snap-rifle with it. I was hauled up into a standing position by the strap, which was still wrapped around my arm.

I got a close look at the monster that had me. The scales were bright red—almost a crimson—and there was a long, old, ridged scar of gray skin running up its gut. At some point in this monster’s past, it had been badly injured.

I was inches from the jugger’s deadly maw. Dangling and cursing, I managed to slip free and fall back into shelter before the monsters could dismember me. I jeered at the lizard, which was still trying desperately to eat me.

“Retreat!” shouted Weaponeer Lund.

He hadn’t been firing his belcher, and I’d been too busy to wonder why. Now, I didn’t bother. Like the rest of them, I slithered down into the drilled holes and fell into the tunnels below. The juggers caught one more recruit by the foot and took him apart before we could make it to safety.

The weaponeer was on his com-link, reporting in. “We lost Twelve. Repeat, Bunker Twelve is gone. We’ve retreated underground.”

I thought “bunker”
was an extravagant name for the burnt, twisted pile of wreckage that we’d been crouching in for the last few hours. They’d once been real bunkers, with a roof and a door. Now, they all looked like blasted craters. The roof was gone; the walls were stubby and blackened. The interior was a mass of debris shoved into piles. Still, they worked like small forts scattered around the compound, and they were the best protection we had.

“My weapon overheated,” the weaponeer reported.

I nodded as I climbed to my feet and dusted myself off. That would explain a lot. The black tube he still carried was emitting tendrils of steam and nothing else. I guess that the heat of the environment and the frequent firefights had overloaded the weapon. I hoped it wasn’t permanently damaged.

Lund disconnected from the command channel by touching his tapper. He looked at us. “We’re to report to central. They’re hoping the techs can fix my unit. If they can, we’re going back up there.”

We looked at him grimly, and there were a few groans, but we didn’t complain much. What was there to say? We had to fight them up there or wait for them to come down here. I preferred the open field of fire and the protection of the walls to these slimy tunnels. We all did.

We made it to the techs who looked over Weaponeer Lund’s unit, and, after a few adjustments, declared it serviceable. We were trotting back down the tunnel to our former position when the next attack came.

“I can’t believe it,” Lund said as we followed him up into our bloody nest. “Why don’t they all come at once? They keep coming in waves about a half-hour apart. That last wave would have finished us if they’d brought a hundred more sets of teeth to the party.”

We had no answers for him. We were bone-tired, so we didn’t even crack any jokes.

I checked the time. Lund was right, they’d been hitting us rhythmically every half-hour. In this last attack we’d lost dozens of troops. I suspected there were only a few hundred of us left in all.

We set up again in the nest and tried to push the dead out of our positions. When the other bunkers had gotten our report, they’d unloaded on this location, killing one of our attackers in the center of the nest.

The body of a dead jugger is hard to dislodge. The weight was too much to move for only four people. We didn’t have the strength to make it do more than flop and shift. We finally got it to the edge of our nest, but no farther. We decided to use the body as a shield and fire over it.

I had a new snap-rifle by this time, borrowed from a dead comrade. My own had been chewed into uselessness.

Once the big body was gone, we had the blasted bits to contend with. As I strained to shovel mounds of charred bone to make a new spot for myself at the edge of the crater, I reflected on my choices in life. Video games hadn’t led me to expect this sort of experience. I found myself fantasizing about a quick death during the next go-round. I shook my head to clear it of such defeatist thoughts.

We all had a bad feeling about the fourth wave. The only good news was that the twin suns were beginning to go down. On Cancri-9, fighting in the dark was a blessing.

The fourth attack began like most of them did. But again, their tactics had changed. This time, when they all rushed in, they concentrated on just a few of the bunkers. Instead of sending three or four at each target, they clustered around the same spots where they’d had success before.

Ours was one of the lucky bunkers, naturally. Since they’d killed two recruits here and chased the rest of us underground, they decided to try their luck at the same spot again.

Weaponeer Lund did his best. He laid out heavy fire, melting two juggers before they even reached us. But our snap-rifles only brought down one more, and then we were overrun again.

“Retreat! Get down into—”

That was all we heard from Lund. We’d all been slithering backward, feeling with our boots for the holes that would allow us to drop back into the tunnel under this position and into relative safety. The weaponeer didn’t make it. His head popped off in the jaws of the first saurian to reach the spot, the one that seemed to be leading the charge.

As I fell back into gloom of the tunnel below, I gazed up at the bloody, triumphant monster that had taken Lund’s head. I realized with a jolt of recognition that I knew this monster. It had scales of crimson and a belly gouge along its gut. The mouth was painted red with Lund’s blood. It looked proud of itself.

I fired a stream of pellets up out of the tunnel and into its face until it shied away.

Trotting toward the central gathering point where we were supposed to rally if we were pushed back, I began wondering: how had that same lizard returned to that same spot?
When Leeson stepped into the rally point, I tried to get his attention. Leeson’s face was white. He’d lost a hand and plenty of blood. I decided it was best to wait to bring up my thoughts. He might not live to see the next wave.

Specialist Matis came to work on him next. He soaked the stump of Leeson’s wrist in orange fluid and I could tell it burned. Leeson was in agony. A needle appeared and plunged into his arm. After stiffening, Leeson’s pain eased quickly.

“I could give you another, Adjunct,” Matis said quietly.

Leeson looked up but shook his head. “That would be toxic.”

Matis nodded his head. “Sometimes, a man has to know when he’s beaten. Your hand is missing, sir. You can’t keep fighting like this.”

“Bullshit,” slurred Leeson. “I’m a commander. I’m one of the last. I can give orders with one hand. Stop pumping happy-drugs into me.”

“Yes sir,” murmured Matis, as if he thought the adjunct was crazy.

My estimation of Leeson rose at that moment. He was going to stay here, fighting to beat the enemy. He was committed. It was hard not to admire that in an officer.

“What are you gawking at, Recruit? Never seen a man with one hand before?”

As a matter of fact, I had seen several during my short service in Legion Varus, but I decided not to bring it up. “Sir, I noticed something that I thought I should report. That is, if you are in good enough shape to listen.”

“Talk all you want. I’m feeling fine.”

To demonstrate, he waved his stump at me. Disinfectant fluids dribbled. I figured he was at least partially high from whatever Matis had shot into him. I wasn’t sure if that was better than pain or not when it came to giving commands, but that wasn’t my decision to make.

“I saw a red jugger up topside,” I told him, “during the last attack. Then I saw him again just now.”

Leeson frowned at me, concentrating on my words.

“So the hell what?” he asked. “They come in all kinds of colors. Saw three lime green bastards recently, running together like they were brothers.”

“Right, sir. But bright red ones are rare. And this one had a scar, a belly-scar I recognized. He came at us twice, once this attack and once the last one. And he knew enough to kill our weaponeer right away this time.”

“Yeah, so what? If you don’t have a point, stop bothering me. I—”

“Sorry sir,” I said quickly. “The point is that the report said all the lizards from the last wave were destroyed. All of them. If that’s true, how can this one red bastard be back?”

Leeson stared at me for several seconds. I could tell he was trying to concentrate. “You’re saying that we didn’t get all of them. That at least one ran off.”

“That’s a possible answer, Adjunct.”

“What the hell else could it be?” he snarled at me suddenly.

I suspected the initial euphoria of the drug Matis had injected was fading. He was wincing in pain again, as if he was being repeatedly stung. Leaning to his right side, he cradled his damaged limb.

“I’m sorry sir. I’ll head back to my post.”

“No point,” he snapped. “We’re abandoning Twelve. You have no weaponeer. I’m reassigning survivors to man other positions.”

“Right. Who should pick up the weaponeer’s tube, Adjunct?”

“Huh? Oh…nobody. Leave it down here. Has a bad actuator anyway, according to the techs.”

I nodded disappointedly.

He laughed at me. “You wanted a chance to fire a heavy weapon, didn’t you? Well, you don’t have the kit or the training. You have to wear a heavy generator, and you have to know what you’re doing. There’s backwash, you know. You can’t see it, but it’s there. If you don’t have training you’re as likely to take out your own team with that thing as the enemy.”

I didn’t think it was all that difficult, but I nodded. “I’ll be going, sir.”