The skirmish line, an open semicircle now, reached the position about forty yards from what was left of the battle, where six ’heads crouched in the grass, firing their snipguns. The line of men advanced another five yards, and the ’heads ducked behind it to Vanderling’s side.
“Drop and fire!” Vanderling roared.
The semicircle of men dropped to one knee, opened up with their rifles. Vanderling and ten ’heads, all armed with snipguns, crouched behind the line in a tight group at the focus of the semicircle.
The first volley caught the battle-crazed, preoccupied Killers almost totally by surprise. Scores of them went down. Then the rest charged right at the massed fire.
There was a short moment or two of confusion, rapid gunfire, and death. The remnants of the Killer force charged, firing their rifles as they came, perhaps ninety or a hundred of them, determined to close with the guerrillas at all costs, madly confident of their superiority in hand-to-hand combat, no matter what the odds. Men fell on their faces all along the guerrilla line as buffets tore into them. Vanderling dove on his face, hid behind a body…
But the Killers were charging straight into the focus of a withering, shallow crossfire. Twenty yards away, fifteen, twelve, and Vanderling, peeping up over his human bulwark, saw that the screaming Killers, their lips flecked with blood-reddened foam, were going down like flies as they passed between the horns of the crescent, took volley after volley from three sides.
Then they were only ten yards away from the center, maybe fifty of ’em, tossing aside their guns and unshipping morningstars, waving them above their heads, howling like the hounds of hell.
“NOW!” Vanderling shouted, rising to one knee, pressing the trigger of his snipgun, fanning it in narrow little arcs.
On either side of him, five herogyn-heads, eyes blazing, arose to firing position, fired their snipguns at point-blank range into the pack of screaming Killers.
It was over in an instant. One moment fifty black-clad men charged forward, howling, waving morning-stars. The next they were fifty headless torsos that stumbled forward for a few steps, then fell among their still-rolling heads, like a flock of mad turkeys that had barreled straight into the blade of an enormous knife.
Screaming wordlessly, his hands convulsed like claws around his snipgun, Vanderling kept firing, raking the twitching bodies, cutting them into chunks of bleeding meat, slicing the chunks into smaller pieces till all was an amorphous mass of featureless, bloody flesh.
A long minute later, he stood up, the warm flush of adrenalin filling him with a pleasant languor. Before him was a grotesque pile of loose arms, legs, chunks of bodies, heads, lying in a great pool of bright red blood. Two hundred or so soldiers of the People’s Army stood up dazedly, then cheered. The bodies of scores of others did not move.
Fifty yards away was a mess that utterly dwarfed the carnage at his feet—a great garbage heap of bodies, pulped bleeding corpses, Killers and bandits alike at last united by an ocean of congealing blood. Here and there a body—Killer or bandit—twitched, screamed, or moaned and was stilled by a fusillade of shots from the watching soldiers.
Vanderling smiled, a deep smile of satisfaction, as he surveyed his handiwork. Another easy turkey shoot! The Killers were all washed up, they were losing thousands of men like this all over the planet. Soon, very soon, they would have to try a retreat, pull back to Sade with their tails between their legs.
Vanderling laughed. Then would come the best turkey shoot of all!
“War as a spectator sport,” Sophia O’Hara said as she eyed the scene in the lifeboat’s viewscreen dubiously. “What won’t they think of next? Peanuts, anyone? Program? Can’t tell the good guys from the baddies without a program…”
The viewscreen showed a thick column of trucks snaking across a wide plain toward the horizon, trucks filled with Killers, more Killers on foot, herding Meatanimals, prisoners, a gigantic convoy heading east toward Sade, as Fraden kept the ’boat circling high above the massive movement of men and machines, well out of rifle range.
“You didn’t have to come along…” Fraden muttered, knowing that it was a half-lie, knowing that she could no longer bear being in the guerrilla camp alone, anywhere on the planet except by his side for more than a few hours. Knowing too, that he wanted her here, wanted her with him to share this moment of triumph.
“Wouldn’t have missed it for the world,” she said dryly. “Nothing like a woman who shows some interest in her man’s job, I always say. Or as Count Dracula put it to his somewhat reluctant progeny, ‘A family that preys together, stays together.’ ”
Fraden made a choking sound, somewhere between a laugh and a groan. “I’m not so sure you don’t really mean that,” he said.
“Neither am I,” she answered. “This planet seems to bring out the Transylvanian blood in everyone. Bullethead… I won’t even mention him, we’ve just eaten. And you trading the lives of your own men for Killers as if they were marbles—six greens for a black. And here I am, getting my jollies out of watching… what did you call it, the Long Retreat? On top of everything else, you’ve developed a revolting penchant for speaking in capital letters.”
“Just a passing allusion to the great Chicom march to Yunan in one of those endless twentieth-century wars,” Fraden said somewhat archly. “The circumstances axe somewhat similar.” He pointed to the viewscreen. The road that wound across the plain, around hills, through patches of jungle, was black with Killers and trucks, virtually from horizon to horizon. Far away on the western horizon, a pall of smoke hung in the air over the jungle where one of the innumerable little harrying forces had hit the convoy. It had been a Long Retreat for the Killers, indeed, far longer, no doubt, than they had bargained for…
“There it is, Soph,” he said. “The fruits of nearly a year on this lousy mudball! Every Killer on the planet in one big column hightailing it for Sade with their tails between their legs! It sure as hell took enough to send Moro the message. We must’ve knocked off better than a hundred estates, wiped out two or three thousand Killers before he finally got it through his fat head that if he tried to keep the Killers in the countryside, he’d have no men left at all in a few more months. And so we have—the Long Retreat,”
Although it made him uneasy to admit it, Fraden realized that the retreat had been a lot more cleverly planned than he had anticipated. Instead of trying to pull the scattered Killer units back to Sade piecemeal, as he had hoped he would, Moro had made the calculated risk of sending a big relief column, better than fifteen hundred men and a thousand trucks, out into the countryside from Sade and had actually been smart enough to evacuate the Killers backward. That is, the relief column had picked up the Killers holed up nearest Sade first, used those reinforcements to beef up the force as it moved deeper into guerrilla territory, growing ever larger and stronger as it got further from Sade, so that by the time it had reached the most isolated, most vulnerable Killer groups deep within the Free Republic, it was a huge force of nearly eight thousand men, heavily armed, well-motorized, and impossible to engage in a frontal battle.
It had been a big gamble—it meant, in effect, that most of the Killers had to make the long march twice: once out into the countryside and then back. But Moro had apparently realized that the game was worth the candle. The size and strength of the mobile force had enabled them to take back great quantities of grain, Meatanimals, and prisoners with them, enough provisions for a long, long siege, if the bulk of the force got back to Sade intact.
And it looked like they just might pull it off. The column had been on the march back to Sade for a week now, and while Willem had been able to pick off perhaps as many as five hundred Killers in scores of little ambushes, there had been just no way to safely launch an all-out, crippling attack.
But now, with the column nearing Sade, there would be one lone opportunity to smash the huge convoy and forestall a long, uncertain stalemated siege of the city.
Fraden accelerated the ’boat to
full speed, flew due east until the outskirts of Sade were viable above the wide, level plain on which the city was built. Here, the road passed through a long, shallow canyon between two ridges before debouching upon the broad plain. It was the only spot on the whole route that was ideal for a really big ambush.
Fraden dropped a thousand feet, put the ’boat on hover above the canyon.
“Look down there, Soph,” he said, pointing to the ridges on either side of the road. Just beyond the crestlines, out of sight from the road, the far slopes of both flanking ridges were black with men. Six thousand on each side of the canyon, twelve thousand regulars, better than half of the People’s Army. To reach the city, the long column would have to fight its way through that gauntlet; there was no way around for the trucks. It looked like a perfect, deadly trap.
But somehow, as he waited high above the trap, as the minutes ticked by, Fraden felt his confidence gradually evaporating. The trouble was that this was just too perfect a spot for an ambush. The Killers would have to anticipate it. Still, just what could they…?
“Look!” he shouted. “Here they come!” A thin line of trucks and men on foot had emerged from the tangle of woods at the western end of the valley and were making their my along the road that led through the jaws of the trap toward Sade. A thin, vulnerable line that inched halfway through the valley, two thirds… Willem’s plan was to allow the forward salient of the column to actually reach the eastern, mouth of the valley, then snap the jaws of the trap, forcing, the bulk of the column to fight its way through a valley-long gauntlet of fire and plugging the entire valley with massive confusion…
But there was something wrong! The line of trucks and men that even now was reaching the eastern mouth of the valley was too thin, was just a trickle, and…
Suddenly, the inner slopes of the defile all along the valley were filled with guerrillas, two solid waves of men converging on the roadway. The slopes blossomed in thousands of tiny pinpoints of fire and smoke. The Killers in the roadway began to go down; trucks exploded into flames as scores of bullets tore into their gastanks.
According to plan, Willem halted the guerrillas on the left side of the road which he commanded about fifty yards from the roadbed; Gomez’s men on the right came to a somewhat more ragged halt at roughly the same distance from the road. The guerrillas formed two long parallel lines of fire all along the road, less than a hundred yards apart, with reserves backed up scores deep halfway up the hillsides.
The Killers caught in the valley did not even have time for one futile berserker charge at the two solid walls of men that lined the road. They were wiped out in seconds by two valley-long solid fists of lead. The gauntlet was set, the column would keep coming, and…
But Fraden saw that ho more trucks or men were entering the valley. The firing was petering out in confusion. What—?
“Oh no,” Fraden cried, for he realized what the Killers were doing even as it happened.
There was a terrible roar, a roar so loud that Fraden could feel it through the ’boat’s hull, a thousand feet above the valley. A huge wall of Killers on foot erupted from the woods at the western end of the valley, a great wide front only a hundred men deep. The wall of Killers burst into the valley, filling the entire mouth, extending up both slopes clear to the ridgelines.
Like a vast piston, the wide, shallow wave of Killers roared through the valley, enveloping it from crestline to crestline, a solid advancing wall of black bodies.
Fraden cursed as he realized that the Killers had folly anticipated Willem’s tactic. They had sent in a column to spring the trap, force Willem to commit himself, but they had held their main force, nearly eight thousand men, back. Instead of trying to push trucks and men through the narrow defile past the guerrilla gauntlet, they had sent most of their force, at least six thousand men on foot, into the valley on a wide front, a front that was now flanking the guerrillas deployed lengthwise in the valley on both sides. Behind the screen of six thousand screaming Killers, the trucks, with their cargo of Meatanimals and supplies, were now advancing along the roadway.
“Pull back, you idiot, pull back!” Fraden yelled.
For the Killers, outnumbered two to one though they were, had in fact gained an irresistible advantage—they tore into the narrow, parallel lines of guerrillas in a great flanking front, smashed the lines into mindless confusion, flanked them, enveloped them on both sides, as they barreled through the valley, a great, tightly packed piston of death.
On the right, Gomez’s men were routed, fled mindlessly straight up the dope perpendicular to the Killers’ charge, and perhaps fully a third of them, the third nearest the Killers, were overrun, split into hundreds of little vulnerable groups by the advancing right flank of the great Killer front, decimated as the Killers charged across the valley from ridge to ridge. They had reacted instinctively, fled up the slope where they were already outflanked, and their instincts had been disastrously wrong. Only the easternmost half of the long line managed to crest the ridge to safety before the Killers; the rest were hacked to bits.
On the left, Vanderling had somehow been able to maintain some semblance of order. His line of men was fleeing straight up the valley ahead of the Killers, a long, thin column retreating before the wide Killer front, and as they fled at top speed, the Killers were not gaining on them.
Vanderling was saving his men. The head of the guerrilla column reached the mouth of the valley, debouched onto the plain, rounded the edge of the ridge and doubled back down the next defile toward the eastern edge of the woods and safety, with the Killers now bursting out of the valley and onto the plain.
Fraden held his breath. Would they pursue the fleeing guerrillas, or…?
But the Killers, for once, were playing it safe. They fanned out onto the plain on both sides of the valley mouth, halted as the long stream of trucks passed between their now divided fronts and out onto the plain toward Sade.
When the last of the trucks had passed the valley mouth and was on the road across the plain to Sade, the Killers formed a wide, solid screen behind them, protecting their rear as they made for the city at top speed.
Numbly, silently, Fraden swooped the ’boat low over the valley, a valley littered with corpses—most of them guerrillas—and here and there a ruined truck.
He put the ’boat into a climb, then headed west, back toward the guerrilla camp. It was an utter disaster. Maybe two thousand Free Republic casualties—and for nothing! The Killer force, with its huge load of supplies, was now nearing Sade, virtually intact.
“Well, you can’t win ’em all…” Sophia said wanly, saying anything to break the oppressive silence.
Fraden grunted. “This is trouble,” he said grimly, “big trouble. It means a long siege of Sade. They’ve got enough men to make that damned Palace Compound impregnable, and they’ve got enough food for months. A waiting game… Christ, who wants to play a waiting game? How long can we wait ’em out with an army of god-damned bloodthirsty Sangrans and hopped-up herogyn-heads?”
Five goddamned weeks! Bart Fraden thought as he left his hut to survey the guerrilla camp, for lack of anything more positive to do. Five weeks of stalemate!
Moro was playing it cool, all right. He had eight thousand Killers holed up in the Palace Compound, and with that kind of garrison force, the damned thing was impregnable. He had enough Meatanimals within the walls to last the few thousand remaining Brothers and himself for three, four, maybe even five months. And then there was the mess in Sade. Moro, damn him, was playing the guerrilla game in Sade. He made no attempt to hold the city, an attempt which would tie down thousands of Killers. All he needed from Sade was Sadians themselves to feed the Killers, and every once in a while the Killers would venture into the city, seize some Sadians, and then hole up in the Palace Compound again and sit tight. There wasn’t even any point in trying to take Sade—the city was a nightmare of starvation, a no-man’s land of petty cannibalism, where the only rule was that of the jungle and the onl
y guarantee of safe conduct a gun. With the usual flow of dead victims from the Palace cut off, the Sadians had taken to filling the Public Larder with their own numbers, with the old, the diseased, the weak, anyone they could grab. Guerrillas and Killers alike ventured into the city in armed squads, but although either side could take it, neither could hold it—and who would want to? Both sides were playing a waiting game.
Fraden was waiting for the Brotherhood to run out of food, and as he surveyed his base camp, he knew all too well what the Prophet of Pain was waiting for. Moro might not be the brightest guy in the Galaxy, but he knew the Sangran people all too well.
Fraden gazed around the guerrilla camp and saw men lounging idly everywhere, sleeping, muttering among themselves, cleaning their guns. The camp had a sullen, brooding feeling to it; a camp filled with idle men, an army hungry for action, an army that was now held together largely by promises and the threat of force. Yeah, Moro knew his Sangrans!
The Sangran peasants were still with him. He was in solid there—he was the Liberator, the Hero, he had driven the Killers from the countryside, given them circuses if precious little bread. They would be on his side to the end—they had no other place to go. He had gotten them started on farming, he had wiped out the last of the bandits who had taken to raiding villages once there was no more Brotherhood property left to loot.
But the People’s Army, he knew, as he knew Moro knew, was another matter. They had no one to fight, and they had guns. They had guns and there were no Killers to stop them if they decided that maybe they’d do better as bandits themselves, and they knew it. Moro’s game was clear. If he could hold out long enough, the People’s Army would mutiny, perhaps kill the off-worlders, degenerate into dozens of separate bands, finally into a leaderless horde. At that point, against bandits instead of an army, those eight thousand Killers would look mighty big indeed, and he could simply send them forth methodically to repacify the countryside, district by district if need be.
The Men in the Jungle Page 21
