When Eagles Dare

by Doug Dandridge

  “Do not touch this tree,” he said, looking back at the trunk that was less than a foot from his back. “It is deadly. We poison our spears and darts with it.”

  They couldn’t use those weapons for hunting, since the poison would still kill them if ingested, which was why they wouldn’t use it on hunting weapons, but only on those used for war.

  The female started yelling at him and waving a hand, while one of the males turned and pointed a weapon at Gurgincom. That sent a shiver up his spine. He had never seen the weapons of the invaders used, since he lived so far from their compound. The tales were thought to be exaggerated, but if the stories only told half the truth, they were still deadly beyond belief.

  Gurgincom kept speaking and gesturing, all he could think to do.

  “We have more of the aliens coming,” said another of the males, one still out in the darkness as a scout.

  “How many?” he called out.

  “Ten of them. Maybe more.”

  By the gods, thought the leader, closing his eyes for a moment. Now they outnumber us, and they have superior weapons. There is no way they will come with us now.

  “We,” the alien female said. The sound wasn’t coming from the orifice under her nose, but seemed to originate from the covering on her head. “Kill.”

  Gurgincom moved away from the tree, moving his spear down to point at the female. She had said we kill. Did that mean they were going to kill the Klanfolk? Were these really allies of the aliens who were ravaging the world, and not the ones they had come to find?

  One of the aliens raised his weapon and pointed it at Gurgincom’s head. The female rounded on that warrior, reaching a hand up and pulling down the front of his weapon.

  “We are not here to kill them,” said the voice from the helmet as she talked with her warrior. “We are here to talk.”

  They are using something to learn how to speak with us, he thought. “We need to keep speaking with them,” he told the rest of his warriors, who were standing dumbfounded after hearing words in their language come from the aliens.

  “Yes,” the female said. “We speak.”

  So now she is beginning to understand me as well, thought the leader, lowering his spear. Then the other aliens were there, walking into the circle, their weapons up and pointed at the people.

  * * *

  “What’s going on here?” Jonah asked, his eyes roaming over the aliens standing around with weapons pointed at his people.

  “We were having a conversation, sir,” Dotty said, nodding toward one of the aliens that looked like a leader from the necklace around his neck. “I’m just starting to get some words in common. Not many, but we’re starting to make progress.”

  “Good job,” Jonah said, nodding. He looked over at the leader of the war party. “Everyone keep your calm. We’ve found the people we wanted to find, and I don’t want anyone getting us into a fight.”

  Data started to flow across the colonel’s HUD, sent over from Dotty’s computer. He could see the vocabulary her computer had parsed so far. Not much, only a dozen words. A start, but they needed more.

  “We come in peace,” he told the native, holding out an open hand. “We are the enemies of your enemies. We are your friends.”

  “Friends,” came the voice of the alien through the earpieces of his helmet as it gurgled out a word.

  “Colonel, could you go ahead and get me the fuck down from here?” Babich yelled out from above.

  “Can we get someone up to him and get him down?” Jonah phrased the order as a request. A couple of people started for the tree, pulling the climbing handholds from their harnesses.

  “No,” came the voice of the alien as he ran in a hopping fashion to get between the men and the tree. “Kill.”

  “Is he threatening us, Colonel?” Kevin Graham asked, pointing his heavy weapon at the alien.

  “I don’t think so,” Dotty said quickly. “We don’t have enough words yet, but he got between me and the tree as well. I think he’s trying to tell us the tree is deadly.”

  “Then get me the hell out of it!” Avgust yelled down.

  “Calm down, soldier!” Charley yelled up. “We’ll find a way to get you down!”

  “Tree is poisonous,” the alien said through the translator. “To touch is to kill.”

  “Why is the bark moving?” Kevin asked, looking closely at the surface of the tree and shining a light on it.

  “We’ll find that out later,” Jonah said. He was curious about that himself. But then, this world would be filled with mysteries. They might solve some of them, but that wasn’t the purpose of their mission. As long as they learned what to avoid, so their people would survive, that was enough. The natives could teach them much, and now they were well on the way to understanding them.

  “How about we use some of our climbing ropes and shoot them up there,” Manny Fernandez suggested, pulling out his own length of cord. He looked over at Amobi. “Think you can shoot one up there?”

  “Of course,” Kabir said, nodding as he pulled his grenade launcher down and pulled the drum magazine from the weapon. “How do you want to do this?”

  * * *

  Fifteen minutes later Avgust was climbing down the rope, his protective gloves locking onto it while he scampered down the thin strand. The majority of his gear was already on the ground, dropped from above.

  “What do you want to do with the rope?” Ivan asked, looking at the colonel.

  “We’ll leave it in place,” Jonah said, not really trusting the cord that had run over the bark of the branch to give Avgust a firm climbing structure. The gloves and his outer clothing would protect him from any touch of the poison, and they had some solvents to clean all the gear.

  “You come with us?” asked the native Jonah thought of as the war party leader.

  “Yes,” Jonah agreed, nodding, then realizing that his nonverbal expression probably meant nothing to this being. “Yes. We will come.”

  * * * * *

  Chapter Fourteen

  “We’ve found something, commander,” a caller said over the comm.

  “What,” Mmrash croaked, opening his heavy eyes. He didn’t know how long he’d been asleep, but from the way he was feeling, it hadn’t been long enough.

  The viewer came up over the control board. The commander didn’t know what he was looking at, but it was obviously something of technological manufacture.

  He’d sent teams of warriors to walk along the midlands’ edge in several areas, dropped off by their shuttle. He hadn’t been sure what it would lead to. Probably nothing, possibly the deaths of some of his warriors as they walked into an ambush, or maybe they would stumble across something, and it seemed one of them had.

  One of the warriors held up a foot-and-a-half long cylinder, and Mmrash cringed as he waited for it to blow up and splatter the male all over the other three with him. That didn’t happen, and the commander breathed a hiss of relief, his ears flattening in relaxation.

  The warrior turned what looked like a valve on the cylinder, and something hissed out.

  “It looks like they tried to hide their equipment, but some animal got to it and dug it out.”

  The camera view came in to focus on a small box with another cylinder set on top. Mmrash thought it looked like some kind of compressor unit, though unlike any he’d ever seen.

  “That’s it!” he shouted out, pointing a finger at the image. “They left the equipment they wouldn’t need below!”

  “What if it was intended to mislead us, Commander?”

  Idiot, Mmrash thought, his ears twitching in frustration. The Humans wouldn’t have left behind equipment they needed to survive in the high altitudes just to mislead their pursuers.

  “Get back in your shuttle as fast as possible, then get down to the lowlands. They’re down there now, and we need to see if we can pick up their trail.”

  “That’s wild abo country, sir. You don’t really expect us to go thrashing through their forest in the
dark?”

  “You’ll go where I say and do what I order, coward!” Mmrash screamed at the warrior. “If I tell you to leap from that cliff, you will do it!”

  The way the warrior looked back at him out of the Tri-V, the commander knew he’d pushed too far. Xlatan soldiers were disciplined, but they were also proud, and the male would fight his commander to the death before he committed an act of suicide on a leader’s orders.

  “We’ll go down to the lowlands and rest through the night,” Mmrash said after a few calming breaths. “No one will jump from the cliff. We’ll start the search when there’s light, in large, fully-armored groups. Now, are you satisfied Sergeant?”

  “Yes, sir. We’ll board the shuttle the instant it gets here.”

  Mmrash leaned back in his chair and rubbed his eyes. He became aware that the pilot was looking at him with an amused expression on his face.

  “You!” he roared, pointing the claws of his upper right hand at the other male, a threatening display. “I won’t order you to jump from the cliff, I’ll throw you from it myself!”

  The eyes of the other male widened as he gulped.

  Now I can’t even go back to sleep, the commander thought, turning away. He’d threatened the other male, and even though the pilot wasn’t the most courageous of warriors, he could easily strike the commander down in his sleep.

  “Get us in the air. I want to be back at the compound within the hour.”

  The pilot twitched his ears in agreement and started up the engines. A moment later he pulled back on his stick and the gunship jumped into the air, then dropped over the edge as the controller set course toward the compound.

  Maybe the boss will be in bed when we get there, and I can get some rest, Mmrash thought. He growled low in his throat at that. There was no chance the boss would be asleep. Or, if he was, he’d be woken when the gunship landed. Then the night would be spent in more explanation of his failure at stopping the Humans from getting to the lowlands.

  * * *

  Logs weren’t the most comfortable of seats, but the warmth around them was enough to make it the best seat the colonel had occupied in a week. A large fire burned in the center of the village, while the villagers sat far enough away that the heat wouldn’t dry out their skins. In fact, many of them lay in puddles that seemed to be constructed for the purpose of letting them cool off and moisten their skins.

  An animal the natives had killed on the way back to their village was turning on a spit over the fire. The smell was enticing, a slightly alien smell, but still an aroma that watered the mouths of people who’d been living on canned rations for a week.

  Children were running through the village, many of them stopping in front of their alien visitors to stare at them until the adults shooed them away.

  “Thank you so much, Chief Adometalo, for your hospitality,” the colonel said to the nearest of the natives, his helmet speaking the alien words for him. He wasn’t sure if the name he was saying was really the chief’s. His translation software was digesting the sounds and spitting out what it thought the name was. In return, it was taking what he said and translating it into gurgling croaks. It was working, so he really didn’t care.

  “It is our honor, skyman,” said the elder, sitting with his back against the same log the colonel was using.

  A couple of women stood near him, dipping ladles into wooden buckets and pouring water over his skin. The species appeared to be semi-amphibious, able to move around on land for extended periods, maybe on a permanent basis, but the skin that augmented their gills in pulling oxygen out of the water dried out quickly. They used lotions to keep the integument moist, but nothing beat the feel of real water.

  “It’s good to be in a safe place,” Joey said, taking a drink of the intoxicant the natives had provided.

  Jonah hadn’t been sure about letting his people imbibe unknown intoxicating beverages, but Dotty had pronounced it safe to drink, as well as having an alcohol level about half that of weak beer. It seemed to be having an effect on the natives, though, and many of them were already staggering about.

  The village sounded like a convention of bullfrogs serenading their mates. All of the Kalagarta, as they thought the people were called, were talking—men, women and children. This was an exciting event for them, a celebration of what they hoped was their coming liberation.

  I don’t want to burst their bubble, the colonel thought, watching as a female fed her baby small pieces of food while she sat in one of the communal puddles. Unfortunately, his team probably lacked the firepower to kick the Syndicate off the planet, and he still didn’t know if the heavily-armed Ravagers were going to show. The chief had already told him the Kalagarta were willing to throw themselves at the guns of the invaders if that was what it would take to regain their world. The image of these people being cut down by modern weapons was almost more than he could take. The guilt it would arouse could destroy him. No, they’d accept the aid of the Kalagarta to make their way to the Syndicate compound, learning the lay of the land from them along the way. After that, he didn’t want the aliens to get involved.

  “We still have enemies looking for us,” Jonah told the chief, looking over at Joey with a frown. “They could attack your village if they know we’re here.”

  “They will not come unannounced,” said Adometalo in pride. “Our camp is surrounded by warriors, and we have patrols in the forest out to ten miles.”

  “Hell, it’ll give us time to set up an ambush,” Ivan said, wiping some of the beer from his chin. “Unless they send in their whole guard force, I don’t see how we can lose.”

  “They can lose,” Jonah said after disconnecting his translator for a moment. “They can be killed by those bastards while they try to stop the enemy.”

  “We are not afraid to fight, Human,” croaked one of the warriors in a loud tone.

  The Kalagarta got to his feet and hit the butt of his spear on the ground. Unlike the weapons of most, this warrior had a sharpened metal spear point. Metal seemed to be extremely rare among these people, who basically hadn’t advanced past the stone age.

  Since they seemed like a very intelligent people, it was a shame they’d have to progress through many generations before they advanced far enough to even enter the iron age. The law of the Galactic Union stated primitive cultures couldn’t be raised up to a level of high technology, so even though the technology was out there, the Kalagarta were doomed to hundreds of generations of suffering. Hunger, disease, maladies that could be handled easily by a technologically-advanced civilization. Even Earth had technology that kept her people healthy and without want, to a degree.

  “I myself killed one of the six-limbed creatures,” continued the warrior, holding up his spear. “I myself brought back the hard material we have used to make weapons to use against them.”

  Jonah looked at the warrior, noting that he was missing his off hand, and had a patch of some kind of leather over his left eye.

  “And how many were in your party?”

  “There were two hands and one of us. We attacked the beast from the front, as befitted warriors. I drove my spear into his throat, dropping him to the ground to bleed out his life.”

  “And how many came back?”

  “Myself and one other.”

  So they attacked one of the Xlatan from the front, where the alien could see them, and the Xlatan killed nine of them.

  “We learned from that incident not to attack them from the front,” said the chief, staring at the young warrior.

  “The coward’s way.”

  “The way of the wise,” replied the chief.

  These people could wage a hell of a guerilla war if they had the right equipment. If he and his party weren’t killed on this mission, he had to find a way to get some of his equipment into their hands. Against the law, but if he was dead, who could they blame?

  “Now we have these visitors among us,” continued the warrior, ignoring what his chief had said. “They will kill
the invaders for us.”

  “And we will help,” said the chief, not paying attention to the look the colonel was sending his way.

  “No,” Jonah said. “I appreciate the gesture, but we’ll handle this on our own.”

  “Be reasonable, Human. There are ten and nine of you, while your enemy has many tens of tens. And the six limbs are easily your physical match, while I have doubt that your weapons are any fiercer.”

  “We’ll use strategy,” Charley said, joining in the conversation. “Fight from ambush.”

  “Then you will kill more of them,” argued the chief, “and still you will die.”

  The old bastard may be a primitive, thought Jonah, but he’s no dummy.

  “We have friends coming. Friends who fight in armored suits with heavier weapons than anything we have.”

  “And when will they be here?”

  Jonah wasn’t even sure if the Ravagers would still come. He didn’t want to lie to these people, but he also didn’t want them giving up hope.

  “Soon,” he said. “Within a week.”

  “Then we need to start off in the morning,” said the chief. “Their base is two hundred miles from here. There are many rivers to cross, and you don’t look like swimmers to me.”

  “We can swim,” Joey said, his voice rising in anger. “Why, I bet I can outswim any of you…”

  “Joey. Shut up. These people live much of their lives in the water. I doubt the best swimmer on Earth could beat their weakest in a race.”

  “You are not a swimming people,” said the chief, looking over at the young Sioux warrior. “Looking at you, you are a tree climbing people, and a running people. Two great skills for one species to have. You can learn to swim, after a fashion, but my people are born to the water. It is more of a home to us than the land.”

  “Then why do you live in this forest?” Charley asked, leaning forward on his log. “It would make more sense to live near the water, yes? Maybe in it?”

  “The forest is not inhabited by the enormous predators of the rivers. We can handle them if we are vigilant, but still they take many of our young. Our habit is to birth the babies in the water, then raise them on the land. However, there is an even better reason to live far from the rivers.”