by B. V. Larson
“Freaks either way.”
I didn’t bother arguing with him, and I kept hiking up the side of the cliff. We really needed to get to the top before the storm rolled in.
“Hey,” Cooper said after another hundred steps. “Don’t look now, but we’ve got company.”
Glancing back, I saw a knot of figures. They looked kind of like men—but they weren’t men. They were Scuppers. About a dozen of them.
It had begun to rain lightly, and the mist from the sea was whipping around the cliffs. The wind was picking up.
Still, I halted and stared. Zooming in with my faceplate optics, I got a good look at them.
They were weird-looking, just like Cooper had said. Walking upright with tails, they reminded me somewhat of saurians. But these guys were taller and thinner of build. They also seemed more primitive because they didn’t wear much for clothing, just a harness for weapons. Their exposed skin was smooth and colored in various patterns. Most of them were a dark blue, or a sea green, but some had yellow and red splotches.
Most importantly, I noted that each one carried a long stick with a pointed metal knob on top.
“They have some kind of spear,” I said. “With a metal tip.”
“Yeah, that’s what passes for a gun for these losers,” Cooper said. “Those sticks can shock you so hard your balls will light up.”
“That’s all they’ve got?”
“Pretty much… why do you think they called Earth for help?”
Turning away, we marched up the cliff, moving faster than before. We were supposed to be on the same side as these amphibians, but misunderstandings were common on new planets.
When we got near the top, I was huffing a little. I’d turned off the exoskeletal power in my suit, as I wanted to save what power I had left.
“Cooper, you think these guys are dangerous?”
“They’ve killed men at times, now and then. But all that happened before you got here. We’ve been hiding inside Fort Alpha for weeks now, waiting out the storms.”
“That’s a waste of time. The storms are never going to quit.”
“All you’ve got to do is convince Turov of that.”
I stopped talking. Cooper had brought up Turov, and I knew what he meant. People generally whispered about my relationship with the Tribune. It was considered unseemly, if not entirely against regs. At least we were both officers now, only two steps apart in rank.
When we got to the top of the cliff, the storm got worse. I think it was because we were exposed now without a single rocky wall to protect us on one side. At least the immediate threat of a fall to our deaths had passed.
But then I caught sight of a throng of oddly shaped figures. They approached from several angles at once. There had to be hundreds of them.
“Scuppers…” Cooper whispered.
He was invisible again.
“Slip away,” I told him. “Evade and report. I’ll talk to them.”
“Luck, McGill.”
From every direction, the ominous crowd of amphibians began to close in.
Cooper was gone, just like a ghost—that lucky bastard.
-36-
The leader was an acid-green monster with one yellow splotch over his left eye. He was taller than me, and he had arms almost as thick as a normal man’s—which still looked pretty skinny for his height.
He approached, and I turned on the translation app on my tapper.
“…inferior…” he said. “Poor quality. Abasement…”
Hmm… already, this guy wasn’t filling me with confidence. I thought about reversing course and heading back down the cliff to take my chances with the storm on the beach, but the other party was moving up the path toward me, boxing me in.
As I watched, now and then they got down on all fours and scuttled along like dogs—or maybe more like swamp gators back home. They could move pretty fast when they wanted to.
“Hello there Mr. Scupper, sir!” I said in a cheery tone.
“Disgust… resentment…” he said.
“Uh… you don’t like me?”
The odd head canted to one side. It was a universal pose of puzzlement. Maybe most beings did it in order to hear better.
“You speak the language,” he said. “But you are still inferior. You are an insult.”
“How’s that?”
“Earth promised an army. Earth demanded fealty. Earth sends a paltry few troops—frightened worms that sit inside their strange walls, terrified of a few raindrops.”
Speaking of raindrops, the wind was beginning to do that gusting and screaming thing. The rain was coming down, harder and harder. Soon, it would be lashing us.
The Scuppers took no notice of this. They weren’t cold or uncomfortable. I got the feeling they liked it wet. The salamanders out in the bog behind my shack were like that. They were sort of like lizards with the skin of a frog.
If there was one thing I’d learned in my many travels among the stars, it was to remain calm if your hosts were calm. I was determined, therefore, to ignore the growing darkness and the lashing winds and rain. After all, to these guys, this weather wasn’t a big deal.
“I’m not afraid of rain,” I told him. “I’m not afraid of the Wur, either. I’ve killed thousands of their defensive growths. Lastly, I’m not afraid of you.”
The big eyes blinked. The left one, the one with the yellow ring around it, leaned closer. It looked like a giant frog-eye.
There was no emotion there that I could read. No pity. No anger—but then again, it was hard to read a cold-blooded animal.
“You challenge Scuppers?” he asked me.
“Uh… no, I didn’t say that.”
“You are inferior. You are like an egg in its mother’s sac, waiting to be seeded by a male. You are—”
“Hold on,” I said. “I thought we were allies. I didn’t come all this way to listen to insults. Do you clowns want help or not?
The translator on my arm burbled, and they reacted by shuffling around and hissing. I didn’t care. I was getting tired of these slimy-skinned assholes. Cooper’s words echoed in my mind, how he’d talked about wanting to kill all aliens, and I tried to calm down. Maybe it was natural for two species that were so different to become hostile upon meeting one another.
The Scupper leader, however, wasn’t trying too hard to make friends. “We don’t accept cowards as allies,” he said. “Show us you are no coward.”
“Okay… I came all the way out here, didn’t I? I didn’t run from you when you came from both directions.”
“Foolishness doesn’t translate to bravery. I see before me one who has run from every threat. A dry-thing that has fallen into simple traps and nearly died trying to figure out the tubes, a system every infant Scupper has mastered.”
“You mean the underground transport system? Yeah, we figured it out. Works pretty well once you get used to it.”
“Naturally. Scuppers do not build useless things.”
I was beginning to grind my teeth again.
“Listen up,” I told him. “You can welcome me, or you can get out of my way. Your choice.”
A series of popping sounds went up from the crowd. Were they blowing spit-bubbles and popping them? That was my impression. As to what it meant, I had no idea. They could have been laughing or raging or farting—or all three. I really didn’t care.
“To gain our respect, you must slay the leader.”
“Um… kill you? But that’s not why—”
He made a move then, one I wasn’t expecting. He swung his big spear-thing at me. The knob crackled with electricity.
I was wearing a breastplate and some other titanium armor pieces. That made it hard to dodge, and he’d taken a poke at me by surprise.
Startled, I raised an arm—but there was a crackle and a surge of electrical current. It ran through my armor, and to a lesser degree, my body.
That knob had touched me. It had shorted out most of my subsystems.
That was
bad, as I was now trapped inside a heavy suit of dead armor. My faceplate computer had died. At least my body hadn’t given up the ghost yet.
Legionnaire armor was insulated on the inside with a sheath of flexible polymers. It was kind of like wearing a wet suit underneath the metal plates. As a result, I didn’t have a cardiac arrest, but I did get a nasty sting on the collarbone, where he’d landed his stick on me.
Reacting without much thought, I levered up my arms to a defensive posture. It was hard to do, as my armor was no longer power-assisting my movements.
Still, I managed to club away his staff with one fist.
He croaked at me, staggering back a step. Then he caught his balance again and squared off with me. His stick was held high.
When he came at me again, I was ready. I managed to get out my combat knife. I slashed and took off his right hand at the wrist.
The skinny green arm leaked dark blood, but his severed hand still gripped that staff. Reaching out with my other hand, I shoved him, planting a gauntlet on his chest.
He fell back and landed on the rocks. Stepping forward, I put a heavy boot on his staff. He struggled weakly with his one thin arm to free it, but I could have told him it was hopeless.
“Yield, sir,” I said. “You’ve been beaten.”
“My life is at an end.”
“Nope. Doesn’t have to be. Become my ally and friend, and I’ll spare you.”
Saying this, I lifted my knife from his throat and stepped back.
Slowly, he got up and found his severed hand. He slipped it into a pouch.
“Why do you shame me like this?” he asked. “Did I slay your mother in her sleep?”
“Uh… I don’t think so. Just be happy. I’m giving you your life.”
The crowd around us made popping sounds.
“You hear that?” he demanded. “You’ve shamed me deeply. They laugh, and I’ll never be able to live in peace again.”
“Aw now, come on. Can’t we work something out?”
He scuttled away on all fours, limping badly due to his lost hand.
As he moved through the crowd, several of them thumped him with the butt of their staves and kicked him in the sides. He left as fast as he could.
The rest of the army encircled me. Another Scupper stepped forward. This one was a lovely blue.
“I was second-man,” he said. “You are now first-man. What is your command, First-man?”
Gawking, I looked around at the horde of amphibians. They were all intent, waiting for orders.
“Um…” I said. “Let’s march back to the human fortress.”
They all stood there.
“Why aren’t you walking?” I asked.
“You are our leader. You must lead.”
“Okay… Right. You there, yellow-belly. You’ll walk ahead as my scout. Start walking.”
The yellow-bellied Scupper I’d indicated turned and headed west. I’d kind of figured that was the direction home, but I hadn’t been sure. This way, the throng didn’t know that I had no idea which way to go.
Following my scout closely, I marched off into the stormy night.
Surrounding me, a small army followed. There were hundreds of them, about seven hundred, if I had to guess.
I smiled as I had a new thought: Galina was going to love these guys.
-37-
The storm came and really worked on my army. They had suckers on their padded feet, but when a gust came up, it could sometimes pry a Scupper loose.
That happened now and then, but usually the guy in question managed to survive. He’d curl up into a ball and let the wind take him, rolling away thumping over rocks. When he caught himself, he’d limp back to rejoin the pack.
Twice, however, soldiers were flipped in the air and smashed into the rocky ground again with deadly force. Those men we lost.
There was no ceremony for the dead. The Scuppers simply tested the victim’s reflexes, and if he didn’t respond, they left him where he lay.
Soon we reached the edge of the great forest of the Wur. That was a relief, as the trees sheltered us from the storm and men stopped dying.
As we passed big Wur trees, the Scuppers cut them. They didn’t skip any trees, either. They cut them all.
“Second-man,” I said when I noticed what they were doing. “Why are these men cutting every tree we pass?”
“How else will we rid our land of these monstrous growths?” he asked.
“We humans cut the bark, too,” I said. “But just once in a while. If we cut every tree we pass, they will all grow pod-walkers. If enough trees react and produce defensive growths, we’ll be overwhelmed.”
He stared at me curiously with his bulbous eyes.
“Can it be true, then?” he asked. “Was first-man right? Do you humans fear to fight?”
“No, not at all. We just—”
“How can you remove all the trees from our world if you don’t cut every one you meet?” he demanded. “They have killed millions of our people. We intend to free both the land and the sea of this disease. We will not sit underground, or under the deepest waves, hoping the enemy will retreat out of kindness!”
I thought about it, and I figured old blue-belly was right. I was new to Storm World, but our rules of engagement made no sense. You can’t win a war by sitting around inside a fort.
Then again, I knew Galina might have other plans. Maybe she didn’t really care if she won or not. Maybe she just wanted to stabilize things here and wait for backup legions.
Our last foray to the frontier stars had taken us to Dark World. That forbidding place had been guarded by Vulbites, and we’d ultimately lost the fight to their masters, the Rigellians.
That failure could be the reason Turov wasn’t taking any big chances on this planet. Maybe she’d decided to play it safer, the way Deech liked to do.
“Dammit,” I muttered to myself. “Second-man, halt and stand here. I can see the walls. I’ve got to go forward and tell them who I am.”
“You do not have to tell them anything,” he said firmly. “You are first-man. You lead this army. We live and we die at your sufferance. Surely, these fearful humans will bow to your greatness.”
“Um… that’s all well and good, but I don’t even know if these humans will accept your kind inside our walls. Trust me—you’re going to have to wait here.”
I’d said this last firmly, so he waited. He stepped from one big webbed foot to the other as if he had to pee or something. He was clearly agitated, but that was too damned bad.
At the gates, I used my tapper to hail the guards. The gate commander was none other than Centurion Manfred. He finally came out to meet me after delaying a few minutes.
“Centurion McGill?” he called down from the wall top. Fortunately, we had a radio link or we wouldn’t have been able to hear each other in the rain. “Did you lose the rest of your unit?”
“I’ve brought along something even better,” I said. “Nearly a thousand new men to man our walls.”
Using his faceplate, he scanned the perimeter.
“Are you talking about those skinny primitives out there?”
“They’re not all that primitive, actually. But yes, the natives want to join us at the fort. An attack is incoming.”
Manfred shook his head. “I’m going to have to kick this up the line, McGill.”
I felt like ordering my Scuppers to blow his gate down, but I knew better. The legionnaires were watching us. Hundreds of them manned the walls.
We waited for a few miserable minutes in the pouring rain. It was really getting soggy down here at the base of the wall. I could see why the Scuppers had evolved naturally shiny, wet skin.
“Check your tapper,” Manfred called down to me.
I looked at the call that made my arm blink.
“Shit…” I said aloud.
It was Primus Graves. I injected a happy tone into my voice and answered.
“Primus!” I said. “Just the man I was hoping t
o talk to. I’ve got the most amazing story to tell, sir, and I—”
“Stuff a sock in it, McGill,” he interrupted. “I’ve seen shots of your salamander army. I’m not impressed.”
“Sir, these guys have pretty effective weaponry, they know the terrain, and they’re willing to die to take down a tree.”
“I told you to go talk to them, not to bring them back to the base!”
“Um… that’s right sir. But they followed me. See, I’m like their mother-duck now.
“Why’s that?” Graves demanded suspiciously. “Don’t tell me you went and spawned with their queen or something.”
“No, no, no,” I said, suppressing a shiver. “I beat their first-man, and apparently, whoever does that becomes the new first-man.”
“Whatever. Tell your new slippery friends to go home. By the way, where is your unit?”
“Uh…” I said. “I don’t rightly know. Didn’t they make it back?”
“No, McGill, they didn’t. You’re a centurion without a unit. That makes you useless. Go back out into the forest and find your people. Then, you can make your report.”
“All right, sir.”
“Oh, and McGill? Walk fast. There’s a serious storm coming in.”
To me, it seemed like I was standing in a full-blown gale already. How much worse was it going to get?
“Uh…” I said. “Sir, there’s one more thing.”
“What’s that?”
“These Scuppers have been scarring up every tree they’ve met up with…”
“That’s not policy, McGill.”
“Right. I know, sir. But they are native troops, not regulars. It’s occurred to me that they don’t come under Varus rules of engagement.”
Graves was silent for a second.
He was a by-the-book kind of guy, but he knew me well, and he also knew the advantage that could be gained by occasionally skirting standing orders from the brass.
“McGill,” he said, “in the name of conducting relations with the native population, I’m going to let you keep your pets. They’re officially marked down as local auxiliaries. Get me an official count and a write-up on their prospective needs and effectiveness.”
