by B. V. Larson
The three battalions of militia, armed with my guns, charged up the slope. Small arms bolts came down to greet us. A few men fell, but the rest kept advancing. I had to give it to the locals, they had some balls in a fight.
At the core of the advance was Colonel Fletcher and his garrison troops. They weren’t running, but jogging. I soon saw he had some wisdom—he’d led the march until the moment of contact. Maybe these farm boys wouldn’t have held together otherwise.
But now, in the heat of things, he was going to let his vehicles and militia take the losses, if there were going to be any. The more professional unit surrounding him would hopefully prove decisive if we ran into stiff resistance.
The enemy had taken up the high ground, at the edge of the land I’d scorched the night before. They were behind mounds of dirt, firing from entrenched positions.
Normally, the whole thing might have turned into a disaster. But Colonel Fetcher’s technicals were charging the line, and the enemy fire was bouncing off the lightly armored vehicles.
Even worse for the ducks, the advancing militia had real guns. Every dozen steps, they stopped, aimed, and took a shot at the trench line ahead.
The results were spectacular. The Sardez rifles blew gaping holes in the earth, knocked out trees and sent body parts flying. It was as if each infantryman was armed with an artillery piece.
The colonial “tanks” ran right over the enemy line, stopping there and strafing the ducks that hunkered in their trenches. They were killed by the hundreds—but I saw some surprising moments all the same.
The ducks, now and then, would jump up and charge the vehicles. They bounded onto the hoods and flailed at the turrets, the windshields, the armored plates themselves. I was shocked by their frenzied behavior and berserker strength. Twice, they managed to wrench a door off the technical and pull out a hapless driver, tearing him apart.
“Ducks?” I demanded. “You should call them gorillas.”
“They’ve always been physically powerful,” Colonel Fletcher admitted. “But previously, they’ve always been docile. These aliens… something has changed them. They rage now in battle in a way never seen before.”
In less than ten minutes, the fight was over. The colonists had easily won. The ducks were all dead or fleeing.
When Colonel Fletcher marched off to praise his troops and see to the wounded, Jort pulled me aside.
“They call them ducks…” Jort said, staring at the carnage. “What is a real duck, Captain Gorman?”
I described the water fowl, and he looked more and more incredulous as I finished.
“These devils are not ducks! That is the wrong word for them!” he told me. “I know this type of fighter. They are on drugs, or their minds have been bathed in acids. They’re evil creatures, either way.”
Troubled, I couldn’t argue. I could only hope the rest of this campaign would go as smoothly as this first step had. If it did, I vowed to take my payment and leave Baden forever.
Chapter Twenty-Two
After sending the wounded back down to New Town, we mounted up and began marching again. The troops were tired now, but Colonel Fletcher didn’t want to stop the advance. I got the feeling he didn’t want to spend the night on this mountain—not unless the enemy had been defeated.
Instead of a stretch of scorched earth, we now walked through a dense forest. The mountain grew steeper, more heavily wooded. Our column was forced into a narrow channel, but still we pressed onward.
At the front lines, Fletcher had deployed a regiment of his farm boys. They were full of themselves now, their morale riding high after a relatively easy victory. They took pictures, slapped one another and laughed, transmitting details of their exploits down to the colonist girls in the town below. Everyone was boasting and hooting.
Colonel Fletcher let them. His own smile was tight. His eyes were wary. He scanned every meter of the ground ahead, looking for flaws, surprises.
“They’ll hit us again, won’t they?” I asked, falling into step beside him.
He glanced my way. “Probably. I don’t know how many ducks you took out with that surprise launch last night, but I’m pretty sure they still outnumber us. That force we met at the lower slope—that was just a skirmish line, not their army.”
I nodded, not liking the sound of this. The advantage that Sardez rifles gave an infantry unit was mostly given at range. They were great for breaking up fortifications, or for digging out entrenched enemies. But at close quarters, such as this densely forested land, the rifles wouldn’t be much better than any other quality gun. If we had power-armor for the troops, that’d be different—but we didn’t. Our men were just as easily shot down as were the enemy.
It began to get warm as the white sun of Baden beamed down on us from directly overhead. It wasn’t burning our skin because of the trees, but even down here, in the green gloom, it got a little steamy and hot.
Quieting and beginning to sweat, the men struggled to keep up the pace. We’d have to stop soon, if only to eat and rest. To keep up my own spirits and my energy, I lit up a stim and relished the bitter smoke.
Just as I puffed perhaps my tenth time, we walked out into an open meadow. That was when the second attack came. Cursing, I cast my stim to the ground and unslung my rifle.
This time they struck us from all sides. A ragged line of the enemy, at least a thousand in number, charged out of the trees. They didn’t have guns, only tools, but they came on with murder in their yellowy eyes.
Our own troops hollered and set up a storm of fire. Many ducks went down, flopping and bleeding and rolling downslope—but more kept coming.
Behind them, another wave appeared. These had weapons. Simple guns, hunting rifles, mostly. They sniped at us and advanced from three sides.
Again, the Sardez weapons proved their worth. Most of the initial charging line was cut down without delivering a scratch—but once they reached the humans, things changed.
The ducks went insane. They loosed unnatural howls, both alien and undulating like a wolf or an evil bird heard at night. Grabbing the hated rifles from our men, they used them like clubs, smashing skulls and dribbling bloody spittle from their mouths. Their webbed feet had sharp claws, and they used these too, disemboweling their wounded prey until they in turn were cut down by other riflemen.
All the while, their rear line was plinking away at us, carefully taking down men who struggled with the berserkers.
“Shoot at their rear line!” I shouted at Jort. “Shoot the ground, blow it up under their damned rubbery feet!”
Jort immediately followed my lead. Colonel Fletcher saw what I was doing, and he ordered his garrison troops who were in the center of the mass to stand clear and fire on the rear ranks.
The militiamen weren’t taking any orders. They had no radio earpieces, no discipline, and no thought in their heads other than to defeat the raving ducks that were among them, fighting to the death hand-to-hand. The whole meadow was full of struggling figures.
Once, I saw a duck slash a man’s head off and throw into the air. Another time, one of the berserkers picked up a young man—a kid that couldn’t have been more than sixteen—and cracked his back on a tree trunk.
The colonel and his best men stood with me in the midst of this wild melee. We fired again and again, destroying clumps of gunmen. They tried to take shelter behind trees, or lying flat on the ground, but if you simply blasted the ground nearby, they were killed anyway.
The fight was wild and vicious, but in the end our side prevailed. Perhaps if the farm boys had had a place to run, they might have broken. But to them, it looked like fleeing in any direction would lead to death. In the end, I had to give it to them, they held their ground and won the day.
Sides heaving, I heard nothing but my own breath blowing through my head and the groans of men in agony. The casualties were much worse this time around. The colonials had suffered five hundred dead at least, and as many more had been wounded. Still, we’d inflicted tw
ice that number of casualties on the ducks.
I did what I could to bandage up the men. Jort helped as best he knew how, mostly by telling the injured they were fine, and that he’d seen worse on a dozen occasions.
“Captain Gorman?”
I turned. It was Major Hendricks. He had a haggard, sick look on his face. He’d taken a round in the left shoulder someone had patched up.
“You okay?” I asked him.
“Yeah, yeah, I’m fine. Listen… it’s the colonel. He wants to march all the way up to the top—tonight.”
We exchanged worried glances. I looked around at the men. They looked pretty well spent.
“What do you want me to do about it?” I asked.
“Talk to him. He listens to you. He likes you.”
We stared at each other for a second. The major wasn’t telling me everything directly, but I got the message. Fletcher didn’t like him or respect his opinion.
My own estimate of the major went up in that single moment. Sure, he was kind of an asshole—but he was right. This ragtag army wasn’t in any kind of shape to push all the way up. If the ducks hit us hard again—our guys would break and run, or worse, be overwhelmed.
“I’ll see what I can do,” I heard myself saying. Standing up wearily, I walked off to find the colonel.
Fletcher was walking among the wounded, talking them up. According to him, every wound was a scratch. Every dead man was a hero. It took him about a minute to notice me.
“There you are, Gorman. I want to thank you for that tactical switch-up in the middle of battle. You know, I think you missed your calling. You should have been a colonial officer. You’ve got a natural talent for it.”
“Uh… thanks, Colonel. I wanted to talk to you about your plans.”
“Plans? You already know the plan, Gorman. We’re taking the mine by sunset. We’re close now—no more than four kilometers from our goal.”
I looked up at the canopy of trees overhead. The sun was still strong—but it was definitely afternoon. We’d already spent an hour or more patching people up.
“What if we meet further resistance, sir?” I asked.
He eyed me. His demeanor changed. He walked close, and he lowered his voice. “Don’t listen to that dickless irritant, Major Hendricks. He’s poison. He wouldn’t know how to win a campaign if his life depended on it.”
“His life does depend on it. All of our lives are in the balance here. More importantly, I don’t want this mission to fail—I won’t get paid.”
Fletcher scowled at me. “Is that all you can think about? Getting some credits? There’s blood on the ground here, Gorman. A lot of it.”
“Colonel, would it surprise you to learn I used to be a colonial officer on the frontier?”
“No…” he said after thinking it over for a moment. “It wouldn’t. What world?”
“Avalon. About a decade ago.”
“Avalon…” he frowned. “I’ve heard of that planet. It’s out on the other side of the cluster, right? Near the Gaean Reach?”
“That’s right.”
“What happened out there?”
I shrugged. “We got wiped out. Some alien marauders. They were low-tech, but cunning.
That whole system is off-limits to this very day.”
“So… you turned to gun-running? I get it now. That’s why you agreed to come along. You’ve got a soft-spot for colonials in trouble.”
I smiled with half my mouth, letting him think what he wanted to think. “Anyway, I don’t think these men of yours are up to another fight today. We don’t know what else they have in store for you.”
“They’ve got nothing. That last attack was it—that was their big push.”
“How can you be sure? What if they have reserves?”
“Why would they hit us with half their men? If they had more, they would have committed everything and overrun us.”
What he was saying made sense, but I was still filled with a sense of foreboding.
Colonel Fletcher slammed an open hand on my back. “Just a little of the old piss-and-shiver left in you, huh? From that massacre on Avalon?”
I tossed him a glare, but he just grinned back at me. “I’ll let you in on a little secret, Gorman. We’re taking this pack of hicks up that mountain, and we’re storming that mine tonight. Nothing will stop me. I’m not camping here for the night, and I’m not going back to New Town. You and your buddy Hendricks can forget about that.”
He stomped away, and I walked in the opposite direction, back to Major Hendricks. He was squatting over the body of one of the ducks. The fallen enemy had been badly burned.
“No dice,” I told him. “The Colonel wants us to keep going.”
“Take a look at this,” Hendricks said.
I stepped closer, wrinkling my nose. These aliens didn’t smell anything like a duck when you roasted one of them. “What am I looking at?”
Reaching out with a stick, Hendricks prodded and stirred up a puff of white ash. “This. See this?”
Moving closer, I peered in disgust. The duck’s chest had been melted by an energy bolt. Ribs were showing, along with charcoaled organs.
“Looks like cooked alien to me.”
“No, no, this,” Hendricks said, tugging and poking at something with his stick. The object looked like a spiny crab. The tiny odd creature was burnt, but still recognizable.
“I’ve seen that before,” I told him.
“Yeah? Where?”
“In the guts of one of my crewman.”
“What the hell is it?”
“She called it a Tulk. A parasitic creature that sleeps inside the bodies of humanoids.”
Major Hendricks stood up, rubbing his neck. “What does it do?”
“It controls humans with pain and nervous intrusion. If you don’t do what it wants, it’ll poke and claw on your guts until you obey.”
“Disgusting… You think the ducks are infected? You think they’ve all got these things in them?”
I thought about the scenes I’d witnessed during battle. The behavior of the aliens did seem to be affected. Some of them had acted like berserkers, which I’d learned was wildly out of character for them.
“Maybe,” I admitted. “Maybe we should cut open a few more of these bodies, to see—”
Before I could finish the thought, Colonel Fletcher gave the order: it was time to march again.
The twenty-two hundred men who were still able-bodied struggled to their feet, groaning and limping. Soon thereafter, we began walking up the slopes. With each step, the path only seemed to grow steeper.
Chapter Twenty-Three
The afternoon wore on. Every fifteen minutes or so, Colonel Fletcher assured his troops that the mine was just over the next rise. We’d be there soon, and the enemy had clearly blown all their strength trying to stop us on the way up.
“And our enemy has failed,” he concluded every time.
It seemed to work. Most of the troops were heartened. I wondered how they could believe him, given their recent experiences, but there’s no accounting for human gullibility. I guessed that believing him was their only way to summon the strength they needed to get through this.
Every minute I expected another ambush, but it didn’t come. We finally reached the top of a steep rise. The road was narrow and ragged here, only wide enough for a single truck to pass. We stood atop the mountain’s shoulder and looked down into a small valley. The walls were rocky, and shockingly, the mine vomited dark water from its mouth into newly formed rivulets downslope.
“That’s odd…” Major Hendricks said. He’d been hanging around Jort and I since the last fight. “Did they divert a river into the mine or something?”
“Great…” I sighed. “They flooded the damned mine. Maybe as a final act of revenge.”
“Smart ducks,” Jort said. “If they can’t stop us, they will spit on us and piss in our mine. My people would do the same.”
Major Hendricks eyed Jort with dista
ste. “I’m sure they would.”
The colonel seemed distraught. Perhaps even more than the rest of us. After staring downslope in shock, he rushed forward, almost losing his balance, and sending up a cloud of dust.
“No, no, no—dammit!” he shouted. His troops scattered out of his way.
Just in case there was trouble ahead, I slapped Jort. “Come on. He’ll get himself killed.”
“So what?”
“Who do you think will pay us if he’s dead?”
Jort blinked, then nodded. “Right-right. Let’s go.”
We rushed in the colonel’s wake. A hundred others did the same.
Soon, we all stood on the edge of a newly carved stream. The flow was swift, the water was as cold as a grave in winter.
“Do you think they could have dug too deeply?” Major Hendricks asked. “Struck an underground spring, or something?”
Colonel Fletcher marched along the edge of the stream like a tiger pacing inside of a force field. He grabbed Hendricks suddenly, and almost pulled the smaller man off his feet.
“What kind of an idiot are you?” he demanded. “They fucked us. We beat them, and they couldn’t handle it. They did the only thing they could to deny us repossession of the mine.”
“But… but sir… We can just wait it out. Until the mine dries, I mean.”
Colonel Fletcher spun around, dragging Hendricks with him. He released the smaller man, tossing him into the water. Hendricks bobbed up, thrashing and gasping. After a moment, he stood. The water was less than a meter deep.
The troops laughed quietly, eyeing their top officers.
“They filled the mine from the bottom, idiot,” Fletcher told the major, pointing at the water he stood in. “It’s bubbling up from the bottom, flowing to the top and forming this river right out of the mouth.”
Alarmed, Hendricks climbed out. He began spitting and coughing. Taking out a dosimeter, he checked the radiation levels.
“The river is hot—stay out of it.”
Heaving a big sigh, Colonel Fletcher walked up to Major Hendricks and put a clumsy hand on the smaller man’s shoulder. Hendricks winced, but he didn’t shy away.
