by Peter Nealen
“And what did they pay you with?” Raesh asked. He was holding his powergun lightly in his hands. It wasn’t quite pointed at the smugglers, but it wasn’t quite pointed away either. And it was loaded.
“Goods and materials, friend, the same as any other contract,” the smuggler said. “We don’t ask questions about these sorts of things, see? Not our business.”
“Well, it looks like it is your business now,” Gaumarus said softly.
“There will be a time for such a reckoning as you are thinking of later, Corporal Pell,” Kan Tur said, his translated voice cutting through the tense atmosphere in the room. “Did you not just make the case that the M’tait are a grave enough threat to justify putting aside the quarrels and wars between human and abo?”
Gaumarus glanced at him, then down at the floor, his lips thinning. Yes, he had done exactly that. And he felt a faint flush of shame that he had needed to be reminded of the fact. He nodded.
“Very well, smuggler,” he said. “But when this is over, we will have words.”
If we survive.
He’d expected the train ride to the jump-off point to be relatively short, but it was not. The tunnel must have led a good way back toward the slope where General Rollo’s Corps had staged the original Line of Defense before the battle. Provenian soldiers, Knights of the Order of the Tancredus Cluster, armed smugglers, and equally heavily armed indig sat quietly in the troop cars, rocking slightly with the movement of the train. The indig were draped with ammunition and explosives, and several were carrying heavier weapons still, including the same sort of 16mm rotary guns that they had brought out in the box canyon, along with dozens of rocket tubes.
There was no more conversation. Even Gaumarus found himself withdrawing into his own thoughts again, staring unseeing at the wall above Chauwens’s head.
It was all coming flooding back again, all the horror and the terror of facing the M’tait. And he felt himself tensing up, his guts twisting inside, at the thought of doing that again. It was different somehow, facing those implacable mountain tribe warriors and arguing that they had to fight the M’tait together. Now that they were on their way to really do it, to face those alien monsters again, all he could think of was the fear. The images flashed in front of his eyes like a macabre holo. Half of Mertens’s corpse sliding down into the troop compartment. Verlot thrashing through his agonized death throes. Those borers chewing at the metal in front of him on the skimmer. The inhuman swarming of Slayers and the horrifically fast bounds of the heavies.
He felt like he was going to vomit. Every fiber of his body felt shaky, rubbery. He looked down at his hands, expecting to see them quaking violently, but they were clenched around the powergun between his knees. He was wearing gloves, but he was sure that his knuckles were white underneath them.
He could feel Kan Tur’s eyes on him, but the Knight didn’t say anything. There wasn’t much left to say, he knew. They were on their way, and they would kill or be killed. That was all that was left.
Forcing himself to look up, he peered around the car. Most of the Provenian soldiers were similarly wrapped in their own reveries. He saw a lot of the same fear he was feeling; men staring at the deck or simply out into space, eyes fixed on a point somewhere just on the other side of the metal walls of the car. Some were visibly pale and sweating, and not a few looked sick.
Colonel Piett had needed to be dragged physically onto the train car. He was all but catatonic, slumped in a seat, unable even to hold the weapon he’d been handed. His coilgun—Kan Tur had insisted that the powerguns all go to those who could reasonably be expected to fight—lay on the deck in front of his feet.
Capitan Maes wasn’t in much better shape.
What Morav Dun and a number of the other Knights might have been thinking was hidden behind their faceplates. But they clearly hadn’t been eager to get aboard the train.
The train rattled and hissed through the darkness as he set his head back against the wall behind him and closed his eyes.
18
The train slowed and halted. The stop seemed more abrupt than before, but that might have just been Gaumarus’ nerves.
The hatch slid open, revealing only more unremitting blackness outside. Wherever they were, the indig didn’t seem to want to chance showing much light.
Blue Moon Above the Salt Cliff stepped to the hatch. Peering out, he turned back toward Gaumarus and signed, [Great Beast Under the Sunset will lead the diversionary force out. We should wait until they have left, then we can move to our own jumping-off point. There is very little room here.]
Gaumarus nodded stiffly, and translated for all the rest in the car. He wasn’t speaking to anyone in particular. He was in a bit of a haze, gulping back his own gorge as he fought the dread that made his every limb feel weak and shaky, like his bones were about to fail him any moment.
They sat there, in the dim illumination of the car’s gas lamps, for what felt like a very long time. It probably wasn’t more than half an hour, but anticipation and fear made it seem like an eternity. Days and nights could have spun past in a dizzying whirl of light and dark in the time that they waited.
Finally, Blue Moon Above the Salt Cliff beckoned, and Gaumarus rose to follow, most of the rest following suit. Colonel Piett and Capitan Maes had to be “helped” by mountain tribe warriors and their own troops. Both men were all but dragged off the train. Most of the Knights weren’t so obviously afraid, but they debarked slowly, without hurry.
Gaumarus found himself on a narrow shelf of rock cut into the side of the tunnel. A second, narrower tunnel, that hardly looked wide enough for a man, let alone the heavy weapons that the indig were lugging, led up toward the surface. Without a backward glance, Blue Moon Above the Salt Cliff started up the narrow tunnel, his big repeater slung across his back. He quickly disappeared into the darkness, leaving the weak glow that filtered out from the train’s hatch.
Flipping his face shield down, Gaumarus engaged the light enhancement and followed. His feet felt like lead, and his insides twisted with fear, but there was little else he could do, as more indig were already starting up the passage, hauling more of the heavy rotary guns. What they were going to do with those inside a M’tait Huntership, Gaumarus didn’t know, but he supposed that they had some kind of plan. He’d learned not to discount the indig’s cunning.
The tunnel was steep, and his legs were burning by the time he spied a faint glow ahead. He gulped air and hoped that it was the surface. His fears had largely been forgotten in the exertion of the climb. He just wanted the pain to be over.
The glow did indeed herald their return to the surface. He almost wasn’t surprised as he stepped out of the tunnel and into a deep, sandbag-lined trench, with more of the camouflage awning that had covered the pit where the smugglers’ starship had been parked overhead. He’d started to get used to the indig’s careful preparation.
The indig who had been ahead of him were hurrying off down the trench as he stepped out onto level ground, stifling a groan. He really wanted to just sit down and rest his legs, but Blue Moon Above the Salt Cliff appeared around a dogleg in the trench and beckoned to him again.
Looking behind him, he saw Verheyen and Raesh, with Kan Tur and Xanar Dak, coming out of the tunnel. Most of his little unofficial fireteam seemed to be there. He took a deep breath and followed Blue Moon Above the Salt Cliff.
As he did, he noticed the smells in the air. He tasted dust, smoke, and something else, something with an unpleasant tang that bit at the back of his throat and made him want to cough. It didn’t smell like anything he’d encountered before, and he wondered, with a faint flutter of panic, if it was something from the M’tait. Would it poison him just breathing it in? Was he already doomed?
He dismissed the thought as he forced his weary legs to move. He was probably going to be dead in the next few hours, anyway. Why worry about a M’tait poison that might take far longer to kill him?
Blue Moon Above the Salt Cliff led h
im through several winding, zigzagging lines of trenchworks, finally coming to another tunnel that seemed to lead down into a bunker. Ducking his head to fit through the small opening, Gaumarus followed the indig warrior inside.
It was a bunker, all right. Dug out of the hillside and lined with sandbags, it had three wide firing slits, two of which were presently occupied by more of the 16mm rotary guns. The central one, however, was slightly higher than the other two, and appeared to be for observation. Blue Moon Above the Salt Cliff was standing at it, peering out. He motioned for Gaumarus and Kan Tur to join him.
He still had to stoop a little to look out, though Blue Moon Above the Salt Cliff could reach it easily. Kan Tur had to bend even farther.
They were dug into a rocky knob, looming a few dozen meters above the Monoyan Plain. That much was easy enough to see; the Oicidan Ridge loomed in the distance.
The sight of the scattered spires of the M’tait Hunterships nearby was enough to tell Gaumarus just where they were, though.
For a moment, he forgot his fear as he studied the strange starships. No two were exactly the same shape, and they were all faintly asymmetrical. They also seemed to be partly buried in the soil of the plain, as if they’d embedded themselves in the planet’s crust instead of sitting on landing jacks.
In the midst of the forest of blackened spikes loomed the vessel that Kan Tur had called the Mastership. It was easily the size of five or six of the largest Hunterships—and the Hunterships were all as differently sized as they were differently shaped—with two large spikes jutting higher than the rest. It looked like a mountain, not a ship. It looked like a volcano, restless and ready to explode.
That strange tang in the air was more pronounced, and he choked back a cough. The light seemed strange too, redder and dimmer. Maybe it was the smoke.
Once he had taken in the nightmarish spectacle of the ships, looking like some sort of malignant infection that had embedded itself in the planet, he saw that the Plain was alive with movement.
Groups of Slayers and other figures of similar body plans herded columns of people and vehicles toward the Hunterships. There were humans and indig; men, women, and children. Livestock too, along with carts and vehicles of both human and clearly M’tait make, heavily loaded. It was just like the stories. No one had ever been able to determine just what the M’tait wanted with everything they took, but they always looted their targets, often without readily discernable rhyme or reason.
And they took prisoners. Often in the tens of thousands. Again, no one knew why. Though there were certainly plenty of theories, each more macabre than the last.
What was certain was that no one taken by the M’tait was ever seen again.
The sight of the hundreds of people being forced onto the M’tait ships banished his fears for his own life, and brought the nightmares of what might have happened to his parents, his brother, and his sister flooding back. He felt himself start to shake.
Kan Tur’s gauntleted hand on his shoulder brought him back to the present, and he brutally forced the panic back. If his family was down there, then he wouldn’t do them any good by collapsing or having a meltdown. He had to focus on the fight he could affect.
[The diversionary attack will wait until we are ready to move,] Blue Moon Above the Salt Cliff signed. [They are in tunnelers, still connected by signal wires.] Once again, the weaknesses of the sign language when it came to technology that the humans had never imagined the indig had needed to be worked around. No one had expected the “spiders” to know what a “telephone” was. [Once everyone is in these bunkers, we can send the signal. Once we do, it will be a short time before the attack begins and we can move.]
Gaumarus just nodded. Looking at the vast numbers out there, and all the Hunterships between them and their target, the whole mission just seemed that much more hopeless.
He’d go ahead with it, with Kan Tur, Xanar Dak, and Verheyen at his side. He’d do it because there really wasn’t any other choice, except to run away to a hole and hide. And as scared as he was, Gaumarus knew that he’d never be able to look himself in the mirror again if he did that, much less anyone else who survived.
Deep at the back of his mind, he couldn’t help but resent it a little. Why should he die horribly just so that the enemy might be thrown off a world he could no longer live on? Shame colored his face at the thought, and he buried it deep, but it lingered all the same.
Somewhere in the back of his mind, Waldenius glared at him.
He watched the horror below as the rest of the attack force moved into position in the trenches and bunkers, lugging their heavy weapons and demolition charges. Xanar Dak had taken the thermonuclear device, clipping it with various improvised straps around his armor’s sustainment pack. He was a big man, bigger than even most of the rest of the Knights, and seemed to carry the extra weight easily. Most of the Knights had simply loaded up with as many powergun charges as they could.
Finally, Fights with Great Beasts seemed satisfied that they were as ready to launch as they were going to get. He lifted the handset for the field telephone that the indig engineers had set up, wires tracing back through the trenches to the tunnels below. He cranked the handle on the box, not unlike similar devices that humans had used thousands of years before, and chirruped into the handset. Without waiting for a reply, he put the handset back into the unit and turned to Blue Moon Above the Salt Cliff. He spoke shortly, then turned to head down the trench to the next bunker.
[It is time,] Blue Moon Above the Salt Cliff signaled Gaumarus. Gaumarus nodded, hefted his suddenly-leaden powergun, and trudged after the indig warrior, with the rest of his companions following.
Once again, Colonel Piett had to be prodded to his feet. Capitan Maes rose and followed under his own power, but he seemed like a man walking in a dream.
The burrowing expertise of the indig engineers had once again been put to its fullest use. There was a covered trench running down from the knob, concealed from the nearest Hunterships by the terrain, and the assault force moved down it quickly. Near the bottom, it branched into several pits that ramped up to the surface, similarly carefully camouflaged and hidden by a fold in the ground.
Once there, they waited.
Five tunnelers, not unlike the one that had retrieved the survivors from the box canyon and taken them to the main tunnel complex, fired up their engines as Fights with Great Beasts’s orders came over the field telephone lines.
Mighty drills roared and the tunneler hulls vibrated as the teeth bit into the rock, propelling the strange vehicles forward. Pulverized rock and earth were compressed and hammered away and behind the tunnelers, forming a sort of vitrified wall to the tunnel, denser than the surrounding material.
They bored through the crust several meters below the surface, arrowing toward the middle of the Monoyan Plain, just inside the outer ring of grounded Hunterships. Burrowers by nature, the indig never seemed to lose their way or their sense of direction underground. They had instruments to aid them, but the best pilots only ever glanced at them once or twice during a tunneling operation.
In the passenger holds, hardened mountain tribe warriors waited, their repeaters held not unlike the humans would, between their knees, muzzles largely pointed up toward the overhead. A few spoke in low tones, barely audible over the rattle and roar of the tunneler. The indig’s hearing was tuned to pick out sounds underground, and so they mostly were able to make sense out of what would seem like a hash of noise to a human. By contrast, their four eyes notwithstanding, they were decidedly near-sighted by human standards.
Rockets and heavy rotary guns were stacked in the center of each tunneler. They were mostly primed and ready; the indig warriors intended to come to the surface fighting.
This attack plan had been intended to be used against the main PDF headquarters building in Capitol. The indig called it Center of Our Enemy’s House. It translated to a relatively short, chirping sound in most of their languages, though it was a longer se
ries of signs in the sign language, should they ever actually call it that when communicating with a human.
Now the plan would be turned against the Raiders from the Sky.
While the indig did not share the same stories about the Raiders from the Sky that the humans knew, it would have been a mistake to think that any of those warriors in the tunnelers harbored no fear of the aliens. They had all lived their entire lives in the shadow of human enemies who commanded the skies and had more sophisticated machines than they could build. They had come a long way toward catching up, and with the cunning of the likes of Fights with Great Beasts and Raider of the Enemy’s Stronghold leading them, they had stood a good chance of finally taking back dominion of their world. But now these creatures, who filled the humans with terror, had dashed everyone’s plans.
Of course the indig warriors were afraid. They were sane.
There was still a chilly sort of confidence inside each tunneler. They were still warriors, and they were carrying the best weapons their people, with the help of the off-world smugglers, could build. All they had to do was surface, wreak havoc among the surprised Raiders from the Sky for just long enough to draw them away from the main attack’s route, and then retreat underground again.
If any of them worried that it wouldn’t be that simple, they kept it to themselves.
The decks beneath them tilted, and the pitch of the drills changed. Clawed hands held weapons ready, quartets of eyes turned toward the exit hatches.
The tunnelers broke through the surface within a few seconds of each other.
The first one was slashed in half by a smoky-looking beam weapon even as it climbed out of the ground. Some of the warriors inside survived the vehicle’s bisection, but the heavies were already pulling it apart and swarms of borers were being fired inside the widening gap by the horde of slayers gathered around the emergence point.
