by Peter Nealen
“Except for that is Single Pulse, and that is Continuous Fire,” Kan Tur corrected. Gaumarus nodded as he got behind the weapon and activated the sights, checking how far it would traverse, and how low he could depress it. The holographic sight was a bright green circle in his vision.
“How many pulses in the power pack?” Gaumarus asked. He could see the M’tait flowing across the valley floor below. They’d be in combat in moments.
“Around five thousand,” Kan Tur replied. “But without careful management, the weapon will overheat long before that.” He pointed to an indicator on the cannon’s side. “Watch your heat levels, or you’ll burn out the tube before you can run out of targets.”
“So, you see them too?” Gaumarus asked quietly.
“Of course I do,” Kan Tur replied. “I could count them if I wished.” He glanced up. “I think your friends can see them too.” Gaumarus followed his gaze to see Blue Moon Above the Salt Cliff coming down the sheer wall of the hollow, head-first. His heavy repeater was tightly strapped to his broad back.
“Those are interesting weapons,” Kan Tur remarked. “Very different from the rifles the scouts were carrying at Bar.”
“I’d never seen them before yesterday,” Gaumarus admitted, a nagging thought growing at the back of his mind. Those repeaters…they seemed almost tailor-made for the indig physiology. But the indig didn’t have the technology to build firearms…
And Blue Moon Above the Salt Cliff handled one as if he’d been born with it in his hands.
The scout reached the bottom and slipped through the bushes and rocks to join Gaumarus and Kan Tur. [Why are we still here?] he signed. [Why are you not ready to move?]
[Our leaders decided to hold here and wait for reinforcements,] Gaumarus signed back.
[They are fools,] Blue Moon Above the Salt Cliff signed. [To stay here will mean nothing but death. Or worse.]
[I know,] Gaumarus said, realizing that he was speaking ill of his commanders to an indig. But at that point, he didn’t much care. And it was not as if they could understand the sign language should they be able to see it in the dark. [They do not think that your people can help us.]
[Did they not see the deeds of Great Storm Cloud Over the River and Hunter of Invaders’ Children?] Blue Moon Above the Salt Cliff demanded.
[Only one did, and he was still unimpressed,] Gaumarus told him. [He still thinks of you as just the scouts who carry our borrowed rifles.] He pointed to Blue Moon Above the Salt Cliff’s repeater. [They do not understand the significance of that.]
Blue Moon Above the Salt Cliff went very still, watching him with all four unreadable black eyes. [And you know what its significance is?] he asked.
Gaumarus steeled himself. [The mountain tribes have guns, either that they made themselves, or that someone supplied them. Given the offworld support that the rebels have gotten, it could be either. And you have friends among the mountain tribes.]
For a long moment, Blue Moon Above the Salt Cliff just watched him, as unreadable as ever. Kan Tur, he noticed, had taken a step back, his hand on his powergun. Gaumarus looked Blue Moon Above the Salt Cliff in the eyes, keeping himself still, waiting. This could go very badly in the next few moments. If Blue Moon Above the Salt Cliff decided that his secret was more important than his friendship with Gaumarus…
What friendship, really? I always thought we were friends, but what if I was always imagining it? My grandfather might have slaughtered hundreds of his cousins, after all.
[You are close to the truth, Friend of Hunters,] Blue Moon Above the Salt Cliff signed. [But I am not a friend of the mountain tribes. I am a son of the People of the Ash Valley. As are most of the scouts you know.]
Gaumarus gulped. [Why? Why would the mountain tribes send scouts for the PDF?]
[What better way to watch what you were doing?] Blue Moon Above the Salt Cliff signed. [And if the Families decided to draw together to try to invade the Badlands, we would have fighters right at your throats.]
“I am sure this conversation is fascinating,” Kan Tur interjected, his translated voice jarring after the tense silence of the exchange of signs, “but we have company. I suggest you wake your men, Corporal Pell, and prepare to fight.
“The M’tait are coming.”
12
Getting the veterans up and ready required very little time; Gaumarus suspected that the rest of them were as keyed up and on edge as he was. One does not easily relax after the harrowing that they had endured the previous day. The support troops took a little more cajoling to get up and get ready; they were clearly tired. But Verheyen did his job well, and with kicks, curses, and shoves, got his men up and into defensive positions.
Gaumarus got down behind the laser cannon, leveling it down the slope in front of them and turning the selector to Continuous Fire. After what he’d seen out on the Plain, he didn’t trust Single Pulse to do much good.
Kan Tur crouched next to him, tossing what looked like a small disc into the air. The disc whirred and stayed up, darting off toward the oncoming M’tait horde. Then the Knight dug in one of his pouches again, brought out the little unfolding holo projector, and opened it.
“Interesting,” he said as another Knight joined them. Gaumarus thought it might have been the one called Xanar Dak, but couldn’t be sure. He wished that they had some kind of indicator on their armor to identify them, then realized that they did; he just couldn’t read the symbols. “According to the drones, there aren’t quite as many down there as a first glance would make one think.”
“Some kind of active camouflage?” the other Knight asked, peering down at the holo. Gaumarus risked a glance at it, and saw that the swarming dots on the three-dimensional wireframe of the terrain below them did seem to be less numerous than he’d expected.
“Maybe,” Kan Tur mused, lifting his powergun. “Or maybe it is something related to the strange sense of fear that our forces encountered when they got within a certain distance of the enemy.”
Gaumarus hadn’t noticed any such thing, but then, he realized, he’d been pretty well terrified already as they’d started the advance toward the Hunterships. Maybe he’d simply already been too scared for the effect that the Knights were talking about to have much impact.
Kan Tur was looking at him. “The good news is that if we keep our heads, there are fewer targets than we feared.”
Gaumarus nodded as he flexed suddenly sweaty palms against the laser cannon’s grips. He could see the swarms below them, and the heavies keeping pace. The sight turned his mouth and throat into a desert, and his heartbeat thudded in his temples.
We shouldn’t be sitting here waiting for them. Even dug in, they’ll overrun us quickly. We should be running. Even as he thought it, the horror and the sheer, animal terror mounted.
“Steady, my friend,” Kan Tur said, putting an armored gauntlet on his shoulder. “I feel it too. I don’t know how they do it. But the fear can only conquer you if you let it.”
“It’s easy,” the other Knight said, kneeling beside a boulder and leveling his powergun. “Simply accept that you are already dead, and nothing they do can hold any terror for you.” Even through the translated words, Gaumarus thought he could sense a wry smile in the man’s voice. “They can only kill you once.”
Honestly, it’s not death that worries me. It’s the thought of the poor lost souls they dragged away…
He glanced the other way, at where Blue Moon Above the Salt Cliff had settled in behind another boulder, his massive repeater leveled. It was only then that he noticed that the scout was talking, faint chirps and clicks and whistles, almost as quiet as a human whisper. Was he talking to himself?
Or did the mountain tribes have comms like the humans did, as unsuspected by the Provenians as the presence of native-built firearms or the fact that most of the indig scouts were not tame lowlanders, but mountain tribe infiltrators?
If they lived through this, he would have many questions for Blue Moon Above the Salt Cliff. P
rovided, of course, that they could still be friends after the revelations of the last day.
While he had never truly been able to read indig body language, somehow he could detect no fear in Blue Moon Above the Salt Cliff. Was fear something that the mountain tribes could even feel? Or the indig as a whole? The realization that everything he’d thought he knew about his friend was wrong had made him question everything about the suddenly inscrutable natives.
Time for such musings later. He turned his attention back to the oncoming M’tait.
Unlike the day before, they didn’t seem to be in any particular hurry. They were not rushing at the humans like the fleet-footed pursuers they had been. They were instead creeping up the walls of the hanging valley, somehow looking to Gaumarus like a stalking jeich, knowing its prey was cornered and enjoying the last few moments of the hunt.
He realized he was panting, the fear gripping his chest like bands of iron. He struggled to slow his breathing down, even as he heard one of the support company soldiers start crying, the sound astoundingly loud in the oppressive stillness of the early morning.
Another one suddenly bolted, running away from the advancing predators. Verheyen, his voice cracking a little, shouted at him to get back on the line, but the sergeant sounded almost as paralyzed with fear, and the order was ignored. Others started to shrink down behind the gun truck, and another started scuttling backward, whimpering. Even so, there was nowhere to run.
None of the men who had come out of the battle zone with Gaumarus and the Knights succumbed to the terror though, he noticed. Maybe the fear of the battle and the flight thereafter had burned something out in them.
There was an earsplitting crack of thunder and a brilliant, gold-white flash. Xanar Dak had just opened fire. A moment later, Kan Tur joined him, followed by a deeper boom from Blue Moon Above the Salt Cliff’s repeater.
Gaumarus realized that, while he hadn’t been completely paralyzed, he’d still been sitting there waiting as the M’tait advanced, well within the range of his laser. He leveled the cannon and pressed the butterfly trigger.
Unlike the powerguns, the laser didn’t thunder, but still made a harsh snap as it ionized the atmosphere and flash-heated anything in its way. The beam was intense enough that it was just barely visible as a gossamer line in the early morning dimness.
Where it struck, it was far more obvious. A brilliant, eye-searing green point appeared, quickly obscured by rock, armor, and vegetation sublimating into vapor with a catastrophic crack.
The Continuous Fire setting put out ten pulses per second. The noise quickly turned to a hissing crackle as he played the pulsating beam back and forth across the advancing line of M’tait slayers.
But for all its fury, the laser was still only of limited effectiveness against the M’tait armor. He saw one Slayer go down, half its chest plastron blasted away from a long, two-second concentration of pulses. He saw others stagger as the beam swept across them, but they kept coming. The powerguns were equally effective and ineffective. Direct hits were the only thing that even slowed the advancing enemy.
All that happened in the first moments. Seconds later, the Slayers had blended into the landscape, seeking the cover of the folds in the ground, appearing for brief moments to dart forward. It was wholly different from their tactics on the pursuit, and Gaumarus briefly wondered at it, as the ground ahead of them was suddenly empty of targets.
Not all the defenders ceased fire with the absence of enemies to shoot at. Most of Colonel Piett’s security detachment was still spraying coilgun fire down the slope, spending pellets at a prodigious rate and hitting nothing but dirt, rock, and trees. “Cease fire!” Kan Tur bellowed, his translated voice amplified enough to make Gaumarus flinch, the blast of sound echoing off the rocky walls above them and drowning out even the crackle of the heavy coilgun mounted on the gun truck. “Save your ammunition!”
“We shouldn’t have held this position,” Verheyen said as he suddenly slipped into the little rocky redoubt next to Gaumarus. “Should we?”
“No, we shouldn’t have,” Gaumarus agreed without looking at him, still searching for targets. “Now we’re hemmed in right where they want us, and they can take their time.”
“Have you ever imagined any creature could be that…cruel?” Verheyen asked, peering over the rocks and down the slope.
Gaumarus wasn’t sure why the sergeant was being so chatty; the enemy hadn’t left. They’d only taken cover. And he wasn’t even sure why they’d done that; they had lost a few Slayers in that opening fusillade, but even if they were fewer than it had initially appeared, there were still more than enough of them to overwhelm the little group huddled in the box canyon.
A moment later, a heavy appeared, tumbling and thrashing its way up the draw, easily moving at sixty kilometers per hour. And it was far, far too close.
A gossamer line, looking almost like it was made of smoke, lashed out from the heavy and came down like a whip on one of the gun trucks. The vehicle was slashed in half, metal blowing apart and throwing the two halves violently to either side, crushing half a dozen of the Provenian soldiers. There was no sign of the gunner but ash drifting down out of the air.
Gaumarus swung the laser toward the heavy, knowing it was too late. It was too close, and moving too fast…
And it suddenly was thrown to one side, disappearing in a cloud of dirty explosions as a cascade of rockets roared down from the heights at it.
Not all of them hit the heavy; they were clearly unguided and had been rippled-fired from a launcher. Rocks, trees, and dirt were pulverized in a swath a hundred meters wide around the heavy, which was still thrashing and writhing under the assault. For all the fury of the rockets’ warheads, they still hadn’t cracked that thing’s armor.
Then, with twinned thunderclaps that dwarfed any of the noise so far, the Knights’ skimmer transfixed the heavy with a pair of 3cm powergun bolts. The thing blew apart, fragments whickering through the air and tumbling back down the draw, kicking up chunks of dirt and rock wherever they struck.
A savage, assonant electronic shriek echoed off the mountains. And suddenly they were surrounded by surging swarms of M’tait, far closer than they should have been. And they seemed wreathed in some kind of inky black mist that shifted and swirled, making it hard to see just where they were.
More of the swarming Slayers were on the height to their left. Heavies and Slayers both were rushing up the draw. Gunfire thundered high on the right, and more rockets roared down into the draw, momentarily obscuring the oncoming horde in clouds of dust, smoke, and flying shrapnel.
Gaumarus held down the butterfly trigger, playing the laser cannon’s muzzle back and forth across the draw, the beam hissing and crackling as it spent its fury on anything and everything it touched. The weakness of lasers in an atmosphere quickly became apparent, as the beam exploded flying rocks and blasted dust to atoms, spending its energy on them instead of the targets beyond them. The small explosions still blasted the air with heat and shock, but not enough to crack the Slayers’ armor.
There was so much noise, from powerguns, lasers, rockets, and heavy-caliber rifles, that he couldn’t hear the buzzing, not at first. Only when the screams started did he realize that the M’tait borers were doing their grisly work.
One of the vicious projectiles smacked into Kan Tur’s shoulder, punching through several outer layers of his shoulder pauldron and embedding itself in the armor. He seized the thing in his gauntlet and tore it out, flinging it away from him. Anything less than the top-of-the-line combat armor the Knights wore would not have been proof against it. Leaning into his powergun, Kan Tur resumed his fire.
Despite himself, panic was starting to rise in Gaumarus’s throat. The M’tait were closing in, soaking up enormous amounts of punishment and still coming. As ferociously as they were fighting, the little knot of defenders was badly outnumbered, by an enemy they couldn’t easily kill. They were all going to die.
Or worse.
Then another barrage of rockets hammered the draw, and a strange, shrill, warbling horn sounded. At least that was what Gaumarus thought he heard; it was hard to tell over the thunderous cacophony of the firefight. But Blue Moon Above the Salt Cliff was suddenly beside him, plucking at his sleeve and signing that they had to move, his big repeater clenched in his other hand.
Gaumarus shook his head, gripping the laser cannon’s controls and trying to keep the pulsing beam on the oncoming Slayer that was now less than fifty meters away. The creature was dancing from side to side, skipping forward while half-obscured by dust, smoke, and that strange sort of dark mist, which Gaumarus was starting to suspect was a kind of active camouflage. But Blue Moon Above the Salt Cliff suddenly grabbed him by the arm, pulling hard, and pointed.
Gaumarus glanced back to see a band of mountain tribesmen coming from the back of the box canyon. They were lugging repeaters and two even bigger-bore rotary guns.
[We must go while we still can escape!] Blue Moon Above the Salt Cliff signed. His words were somewhat abbreviated, due to only using one hand, but Gaumarus could get the gist. [Hurry!]
Briefly, wildly, Gaumarus thought about trying to bring the laser. But it would be folly, and he knew it. He got one more long burst of pulses off, blasting the oncoming Slayer in half, and then he was being pulled away again. “Kan Tur!” he shouted. “We have to fall back!”
A glance had already told the Knights all they needed to see. Both of them were on their feet, thumping the air with brilliant powergun discharges, backing up slowly as they continued to fire on the advancing M’tait.
“All defenders, fall back!” Kan Tur bellowed, his amplified voice booming over even the thunderclaps of the heavy powerguns. “Fire and maneuver! Fall back to the rear of the canyon!”
