by Peter Nealen
Three of the M’tait that were moving between the wrecked tanks crashed to the ground. Gaumarus had no idea what those repeaters were firing, but their bullets had to be massive to hit that hard. Then the indig were moving, slinging their rifles on their backs and scuttling forward on all fours, in the vaguely disturbing, arachnoid way that they moved when they wanted to cover a lot of territory very quickly.
It gave them an advantage over Gaumarus, who couldn’t crawl nearly that fast. And to run, he would have to stand up and expose himself.
He settled for a half-crouch. It was painful, his throat burning with effort and the dust and smoke in the air as he sucked in ragged breaths, his muscles protesting the unnatural stance, but it kept him almost as low as the indig as he dashed forward.
And gave him much less distance to go when he abruptly threw himself flat as another beam weapon swept leisurely overhead at about the same height as the middle of his chest would have been had he been upright.
Suddenly the gap ahead of them was filled with swarming M’tait, beam weapons crackling as they swept the ground in front of the advancing indig. The mountain tribesmen scrabbled backward, finding cover as quickly as they could and returning fire, but little of it was effective. The M’tait were moving too quickly, forcing the indig down with their sweeping, smoky-looking beams.
More dirt and rocks exploded as the beams swept closer. Gaumarus had the sudden, sickening feeling that the M’tait still weren’t really trying to hit them.
They were herding them.
And it worked. The M’tait did not expose themselves except to fire, and the beam weapons kept the indig with their repeaters from being able to rise up high enough to shoot accurately. Step by step, they were being forced back by those hissing, crackling beams, back toward the halftrack.
Lying in a crater full of dust and ash and blasted bits of less wholesome debris, Gaumarus looked at Blue Moon Above the Salt Cliff. [They’re keeping us pinned down until we run out of ammunition,] he signed.
Blue Moon Above the Salt Cliff nodded, a peculiarly human gesture that he had picked up. [I think you are right,] he signed back. [But we are surrounded. Unless we can break out, there is no hope.]
I don’t think there’s much hope at all anyway. But he didn’t dare voice that. Particularly not in this company.
Because while he’d recognized a few of the scouts, the majority of the indig were mountain tribesmen. And that raised all sorts of questions. Such as, what was going to happen to him once they did get clear?
He studied Blue Moon Above the Salt Cliff for a moment, but the chief scout wasn’t looking at him. His inscrutable dark marble eyes were focused elsewhere, looking for some way out of the trap.
A M’tait darted forward ahead of them, and Gaumarus fired a burst of coilgun projectiles at it. It was ready for him though, and was already darting out of sight as he pressed the trigger. The tiny, hypervelocity cones ripped through empty air.
[You said you were too late for the battle,] he signed to Blue Moon Above the Salt Cliff. [How is that possible? The scouts were with the main army.] There was no word in the sign language for “Corps.”
Blue Moon Above the Salt Cliff did not answer him, but fired at another M’tait, then ducked down as yet another beam scorched the ground in front of him. [How much ammunition do you have left?] he signed, instead of answering the question.
Gaumarus checked. He had three magazines remaining; about fifteen hundred single shots, but from what he’d seen, single shots were worthless against the M’tait. [Not very much. Three magazines,] he signed.
Blue Moon Above the Salt Cliff checked his own bandolier. It was the first time Gaumarus had noticed it, and his eyebrows rose a little as he saw the truly massive cartridges thrust through the loops. They looked like small sledgehammers in big brass casings as long as his middle finger. There were also precious few of them; Blue Moon Above the Salt Cliff might have two dozen shots left. He couldn’t imagine that any of the other indig were much better off.
He looked up, scanning the battlefield around them. The M’tait swarms were getting thicker, and moving closer. He had the sudden sense that the aliens knew they were getting low on ammunition.
They were closing in for the kill.
9
Gaumarus suddenly felt a curious calm fall over him as he watched the M’tait flitting from wreck to wreck, momentarily hidden by drifting clouds of smoke or dust, sending more beams crackling and hissing over their heads. They hadn’t fired any more borers for some time, and he remembered the unconscious man that had been dragged back to the Huntership. For whatever alien reason, the M’tait must have wanted to take them alive.
But the knowledge fell on a mind gone numb to further horror. It was as if the realization that he was about to die, and that there was nothing much that he could do about it, had driven him past the threshold of terror and left him strangely at peace. Lifting himself up slightly, he brought his coilgun to bear and started searching for a target, his finger resting lightly on the trigger.
A M’tait appeared only a few dozen meters away, slipping around the crushed hood of an upside-down gun truck. Gaumarus fired, sending a ripping stream of ferrous pellets at it, at the same time that Blue Moon Above the Salt Cliff’s repeater boomed. His own burst ripped into the creature’s shoulder, just before Blue Moon Above the Salt Cliff’s massive bullet blew a hole in its chest.
Without ducking back down, he shifted his aim, looking for the next M’tait. But he was suddenly forced back behind cover again as at least a dozen beams lashed the air above him, hissing and sizzling with their passage. More and more M’tait were appearing now, swarming toward them, moving with a curious and disturbing unity of purpose. Almost as if they were all of one mind…
He swallowed hard and prepared to rise up in the face of those beams that he had seen flay the flesh off a man’s bones. He would sell himself as dearly as possible. He’d never imagined his life ending this way, but now that the terror had seemingly faded away, he couldn’t imagine simply lying down and waiting. He had to fight.
It was what Waldenius Pell would have done. And Gaumarus Pell would be damned if he’d die in such a way as to give his terrible grandfather a reason to think of him with contempt.
Even as he rolled back up into a firing position, however, he heard a familiar, screaming howl in the distance. And it was getting closer.
Then the world erupted with gold-white fire, and thunderclaps that made the indig’s repeaters sound muted slapped him back down into cover.
Powergun bolts raved, turning soil molten, blasting glowing holes in the wrecks of thin-skinned trucks, and blowing M’tait apart wherever they struck. Gaumarus hugged the ground, clapping his hands over his ears as the shockwaves of the bolts’ passage slapped at him, throwing dust and grit over him and Blue Moon Above the Salt Cliff.
Then the howl got even louder, the dark red skimmer blowing ash and dust from under its skirts as it roared to a stop a few dozen meters away.
The armored form of the Knight on the powergun turret had swiveled it away from the wrecked halftrack and the pitiful little circle of indig around Gaumarus. He was pouring rapid-fire bolts into the swarming M’tait, slewing the turret from side to side as he held down the double heavy powergun’s butterfly triggers. Behind him, Gaumarus could hear another set of fans and more hammering powergun fire, scorching the very air as it raved after the M’tait.
The skimmer’s ramp lowered quickly, and one of the Knights leaned out. “Get aboard!” he roared, his flat, mechanical translator amplified by his helmet to make him heard even over the screaming fans and the world-ending thunder of the powergun fire. More of the Knights were up in the open compartment, firing their own lighter charges into the massed M’tait. Beam fire and borers were starting to respond, but the Order of the Tancredus Cluster could afford better equipment than the Provenians, and the skimmer’s armor was holding.
For the moment.
In the midst of t
hat strange calm, Gaumarus realized that they had only a few seconds to get aboard and away. The Knights had managed to surprise the M’tait, but it wouldn’t last. Already, as he glanced back toward the grounded Hunterships, he could see the heavies starting to advance, almost as quickly as the skimmers could move.
“Come on!” he bellowed. There wasn’t time to sign, and he knew that Blue Moon Above the Salt Cliff, at least, would understand. He started to scramble to his feet.
The indig hadn’t needed the prompting. Several of them were already scuttling toward the skimmers, moving faster on all fours than he could run on two feet. Blue Moon Above the Salt Cliff stayed with him though, even as he dashed for the skimmer.
Most of the indig were already aboard by the time he reached the ramp. The Knight grabbed him by the harness and flung him into the tightly-packed troop compartment, and then was roaring in the Knights’ language as he raised the ramp.
In response, the driver flung the skimmer back around, throwing Gaumarus against the nearest body, which happened to be another Provenian PDF soldier, though not one he recognized. Of course, they were both ragged, bloodied, and covered in ash and dust, so he imagined that his own family wouldn’t have recognized him at that point.
The skimmer surged forward, back toward the rising plumes of smoke belching into the sky above the staging area. The turret gunner was still hosing everything in sight with powergun fire. The radiator fins on the twin barrels were glowing almost white, and heat waves were rippling up from the dull orange of the barrels themselves. The weapon was bound to go down sooner or later; even Gaumarus knew that that rate of fire with a powergun couldn’t be sustainable.
But it was keeping the M’tait back, and he wasn’t going to complain, not that he could be heard over the thunder of the powergun fire, the roar of the wind, and the screaming howl of the lift fans.
“If you still have ammunition,” the Knight barked at him, his T-shaped vision slit only centimeters away from Gaumarus’s face, “get your weapon into action. We are not out of this yet.”
Gaumarus struggled to comply, even as beam weapon fire scorched and crackled against the rear armor. Bits of red-hot metal spalled off as the beams’ concentrated fire started to eat through the plating. The Knight leveled his powergun over the top of the ramp, exposing little more than the top of his helmet, and returned fire, the harsh cracks of his shots still muted compared to the ravening, bone-shaking thunderclaps of the bigger heavy powerguns.
Gaumarus wormed his way past one of the indig, who was clearly wounded, half of one thin, sharp-edged leg eaten away, and joined his crackling coilgun fire to the Knight’s thundering discharges. The skimmer was moving so fast, weaving through the wrecked war materiel that covered the Plain, that he couldn’t hope to hit much, but hopefully his fire was close enough to give the M’tait pause, even though his projectiles were going too wild to actually do much damage alone if they did hit.
Off to his left, he could just catch glimpses of the other skimmer, similarly spitting heavy-caliber powergun bolts, as it wove through the wreckage and the smoke at almost the same breakneck speed that their own driver was making. The flashes of the powergun discharges were blinding, even through the drifting smoke.
His coilgun went empty, as a handful of the M’tait’s borer rounds struck the armor plating in front of him. They didn’t bounce off, but clung to the metal, making little grinding sounds that he could even hear over the rest of the racket. He ducked below the coaming to reload; he didn’t want to chance getting hit by one of those. His helmet would probably only slow it down just enough to make sure that he felt every instant as it chewed its way into his skull.
As he rose back up, leveling his coilgun over the edge of the troop compartment and trying to hold it steady, the other skimmer blew up with an orange flash. He gaped at the roiling fireball tumbling across the ground beside them, throwing clods of dirt and whickering fragments of armor plating flying hundreds of meters.
And a moment later, two M’tait heavies, their scything limbs in constant squirming motion, came bounding out of the destruction, heading straight for their skimmer.
“Heavies left!” he screamed, before he realized that the gunner would think that meant the skimmer’s left, not his. “No, right!”
But the gunner was already ahead of him, having seen or otherwise been alerted to the other skimmer’s demise. He was already spinning the turret, and heavy powergun bolts lashed out, the shockwaves nearly driving Gaumarus to his knees, even in the cramped confines of the troop compartment.
The first heavy was transfixed, bright white light momentarily pulsing through every joint, before it collapsed in a tumbling heap, like a slower version of the skimmer’s destruction, plowing up a billowing cloud of dirt and debris. The second kept coming.
“It’s gaining on us!” someone shouted. Wild, panicked coilgun fire raved at the oncoming heavy, but without effect.
The skimmer’s powerguns might have stopped it, but a deafening electronic shriek suddenly thundered out over the field of wreckage, and for a second, even though Gaumarus couldn’t see, it seemed as if every M’tait, along with every construct they had at their bidding, turned and looked toward the fleeing skimmer and its close-packed cargo of humans and indig.
The Knight next to Gaumarus barked a command in his own language, his helmet’s amplification making him clear over the thunder of powerguns and the howl of the fans. It also nearly deafened Gaumarus, despite the ringing in his ears from that horrific noise.
Then the pitch of the fans’ noise changed a bit, and the back of the skimmer seemed to rise slightly higher. The wind howled through the aft compartment as the driver poured on every bit of speed he could get out of the skimmer’s engine, slewing the vehicle around a burning tank hulk.
The maneuver put the hulk between the skimmer and the rapidly closing heavy, but that didn’t seem to deter the M’tait monstrosity. It simply bounded up on top of the tank, heedless of the flames or the choking black smoke billowing from the shattered turret, its claws digging into the metal as its soulless eyes scanned through the murk for its target.
Another wild swerve to get around a wrecked gun truck was the only thing that saved them. Part of the heavy’s body gaped, and a crackling purplish beam scorched the air to blow half the gun truck into a pearlescent blast that knocked the skimmer sideways by several meters. The concussion left Gaumarus dazed, and the next few minutes were little more than vague impressions and bursts of movement in his memory.
Already little more than a passenger, he could do nothing but cling to the nearest handhold and hold on for dear life, as the skimmer’s driver strained his vehicle’s capabilities to the utmost. Never sticking to a straight-line course for more than a few seconds at a time, he plunged into the thickest of the wreckage, dodging burning vehicles and putting as many of them between the skimmer and the enemy as possible. That was made more difficult by the fact that the M’tait seemed to be closing in from all directions.
Their flight played out as snapshots in Gaumarus’s mind, sudden flashes that he could see amidst the rush of movement and the smoke.
A pile of burning trucks, where the heavies’ assault had sent the wrecks tumbling into one another, the bodies of the men inside little more than blackened, carbonized skeletons in the flames.
Another heavy, impaled by heavy-caliber powergun bolts, burst into fire and fragments atop an overturned halftrack.
The skimmer suddenly getting unbearably hot, only alleviated when a sudden swerve dropped the vehicle down into a shallow draw, the remaining grass and ground behind it suddenly bursting into flame and turning molten, as some invisible beam from the distant Hunterships burned a glowing hole in the Plain itself.
Another swarm of the bipedal M’tait, loping far more quickly than a human could run, bearing down on the skimmer from the flank, only to be blasted to pieces by a long, stuttering burst of powergun charges. Horrifyingly, the survivors, even those burned and maimed
by near-misses and the explosions kicked up by the powergun bolts’ impacts, just kept coming, only left behind when the driver poured on more of the throttle to outrun them.
Gaumarus only slowly became aware that they were no longer wreathed in the smoke and dust of the battlefield. They were still moving fast, the fans kicking up a billowing cloud of dust behind them, the thick, gray-green boles of gact trees blurring past on either side. Looking forward and around, he saw that they were in a canyon, the skimmer roaring down a dry riverbed, the fans’ racket echoing off the walls.
“Who is in command?” a flat, mechanical voice asked in Oxidanese.
Gaumarus looked up at the battered, dark red helmet looming over him. He blinked and looked around the troop compartment.
There were easily two dozen bodies crammed into a space meant for half that number. He thought that the skimmer should have been badly overloaded, but it seemed none the worse for the extra weight. He could only imagine that the Knights’ tech must be the best, most over-engineered that they could find. The skimmer probably had a powertrain that would rival a main battle tank’s.
There were seven Provenians, eight Knights, and nine indig stuffed into the back of the skimmer. Of the indig, Blue Moon Above the Salt Cliff was the only one he could recognize. The rest seemed to be mountain tribesmen.
It was hard to pick out rank insignia among the Provenians. At least one man was badly wounded, most of his uniform flayed off his body, his skin blackened and scorched in places. The others were uniformly filthy, battered, and where they had their face shields up or were missing their helmets altogether, they were all wearing the same uniform blank look of shell-shocked horror.
“I guess that I am,” Gaumarus croaked, only then realizing just how dry his throat and mouth were. His water bladder was gone; it must have been ripped off when he’d crawled out of the wreck of his halftrack. “Corporal Gaumarus Pell.”
