By force of arms lotd-4

by William C. Dietz

  MorlaKa fought to control a rising sense of panic. Not in regard to the jungle, which he felt competent to deal with, but from prolonged contact with non-Hudathans. Contact—bad enough in and of itself—was made worse by forced interdependency. To rely on aliens, to place his life in their hands, went against his most basic instincts. Yet that was his duty to the Hudathan race, since without the alliance, and the strength it would provide, his kind would almost certainly perish. The knowledge brought small comfort. The fact that a heavily armed human was following along behind added to the officer’s discomfort. Seebo watched the Hudathan’s back, thought about how easy it would be to put a few rounds into it, and made a silent vow: If anything went wrong, if it looked like he was about to die, the geek was going first. The thought brought a smile to his lips.

  Conscious of his role, the clone turned, and walked backwards for awhile. How long had it been since he had taken part in an honest-to-god patrol, rather than the endless staff meetings, review cycles, and readiness reports that claimed most of his time? Too long that was for sure ... Truth was that it felt good. Seebo turned, hurried to close the gap, and was glad to be alive.

  Eyes watched, vanished behind nictitating membranes, and reappeared. Their owner hissed softly, slithered upwards, and sampled the air. Breakfast was waiting.

  The morning passed without incident. Each individual rotated through point and drag. Hand signals were perfected. Their surroundings became more familiar. Nobody blew a foot off. Not bad for a bunch of greenies.

  Mondulo called for a break, ordered Hebo and Seebo to stand guard, and allowed the others to eat. The human rations included built-in heat tabs, but the noncom liked his cold. He peeled the top off something that claimed to be beef stroganoff, stirred the mess with the tip of his combat knife, and used the same implement as a pointer. “We’ll spend the better part of the afternoon hiking thata way, haul our butts up into the trees, and wait for daylight.”

  “ *Haul our butts up into some trees?’ “ MorlaKa inquired warily, “What for?”

  “So nothin’ can eat ‘em,” Mondulo replied matter-of-factly. “Let’s say one of you generals gets killed ... You got any idea how many forms I’d have to fill out? Too many—so you’re goin’ up into them trees.”

  The Hudathan weighed more than three hundred pounds and didn’t fancy climbing anything as insubstantial as a tree, but he didn’t want to say so. He nodded, finished his rations, and sealed the empty into a bag. Both went into his pack.

  MorlaKa relieved Seebo, who came in to eat. The clone jerked a thumb back over his shoulder. “I think the big guy is all pissed off. What’s his problem anyway?”

  Booty looked up from the log where he was sitting. “It’s hard to know for sure—but it’s my guess he doesn’t like to climb trees.”

  Seebo frowned and gave a noncommittal shrug. “Is that all?”

  ‘That’s all,” Mondulo answered. “I’ll relieve Hebo.”

  Seebo watched the noncom go. It seemed strange to serve with beings who looked so different from the way he did. Strange and a little scary, since he knew how his clone brothers would react in an emergency. Simply put, they would react the way he did—which was the genius behind the founder’s plan.

  Still, Mondulo was sharp, anyone could see that, which made him feel better. When Booly spoke, it was as if the free-breeder could read his mind. “It’s going to be different, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” Seebo replied thoughtfully, “it certainly is.”

  “Do you think it will work?”

  Seebo activated the heat tab and felt the container start to warm. “Yes, sir. Where the humans are concerned. We’re different but the same. As for the geeks, well, the jury’s out on that one.”

  Booly raised an eyebrow. “We need to walk the talk ... so please avoid using terms like ‘geek.’

  Personally, I think it will work.”

  The clone tore the cover off his food. Steam thickened the air. “Sir, yes sir. But that’s what you have to think. Isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” Booly replied. “I guess it is.”

  The Pool of Fecundity had been created by digging a canal from the river into a natural depression. A second ditch carried the water back to the river for a real as well as symbolic union. Only one individual was allowed to use the pond, and she floated about ten feet from shore. The Clan Mother was very, very pregnant. So much so that her swollen abdomen made it next to impossible to walk. Because of that her attendants marched into the pool, positioned the specially constructed litter under her grotesquely swollen body, and carried her ashore. The path from the pond to the village had been paved with a thick layer of crushed white shell. It made an attractive surface and provided excellent traction. A small detail but a critical one, since the Clan Mother was the only female permitted to reproduce. One slip, one accident, and hundreds of eggs could be damaged or destroyed, an important matter for a race in which normal infant mortality ran to sixty percent.

  The village, which was know as the “Place Where the Water Breaks White over Old Stones before Turning South toward theGreatSwamp ,” consisted of some thirty beehive-shaped mud huts clustered around a larger mound that served as warehouse and provided the Clan Mother with a residence commensurate with her considerable status.

  She had a tendency to become irritable during the final stages of pregnancy and was quick to make her annoyance known. The snakelike head rose and rotated from left to right. Speech came from deep in the back of her throat and emerged as a series of variegated croaks, burps, and coughs. “What’s taking so long? We are hungry.”

  The “we” was a not so subtle reminder that she spoke for not only herself but for a generation unborn. Cowed, but careful lest they drop her, the litter bearers hurried up the path. The warriors, their mottled green-black bodies still damp from the trip downstream bowed respectfully as the conveyance passed. Many of them, all of those in their prime, had mated with the Clan Mother, and might have fertilized her eggs. That being the case, they would fight to the death to protect not only her but her progeny.

  The litter passed out of broken sunlight and into the mound’s cool. dark interior. Once the stretcher came to a stop, the Clan Mother used her long willowy arms to support her grossly distended belly, lurched to her feet, and shuffled toward the carefully constructed throne. It was made from tightly woven reeds fitted onto a frame made of steambent wood and decorated with colorful flyer feathers, clan charms, and beads provided by gunrunners. It creaked under her considerable weight. “Well?” she demanded. “Where is our food?”

  A platter appeared. It was laden with dried water skimmers, spiced flit fish, and recently harvested grot roots. A fine feast indeed. The Clan Mother dug in. The eggs were hungry. Words emerged between bites of food. Some of it landed on her stomach, tumbled off, and fell to the floor. Minute scavengers moved in to harvest the crumbs. “Who lurks in the darkness? What do you want?”

  Drik, who had been waiting patiently toward the back wall, took three steps forward. He had fertilized the Clan Mother for the first time that year and felt certain it was his strong sperm that had so efficiently quickened her eggs. “I come bearing news.”

  “So?” the Clan Mother said imperiously, “out with it!”

  But Drik, who had long fantasized about such a moment, refused to be hurried. He chose his words with care. “Five of the offworld intruders left their metal island, crossed the food lake, and entered the jungle.”

  The Clan Mother paused in midbite. Food dribbled down onto her well-rounded belly. “How many of them were hiding in machines?”

  “None,” Drik replied, “although two looked strange, like weed dreams come to life.”

  The Clan Mother chewed thoughtfully. There was very little point in attacking the machines, or offworlders protected by the machines, due to the heavy casualties that her warriors were certain to sustain. But this was something different. This was an opportunity to capture weapons and punish the sky people at the same ti
me. “Wait for them in the swamp. Kill them there.”

  Drik bowed. “Yes, Clan Mother... It shall be as you say.”

  It rained like hell about two in the afternoon, a downpour that drenched the treetops and sent water cascading from leaf to leaf, to soak those down below. Hebo seemed even happier, MorlaKa barely noticed, and the humans were miserable. The water found its way under their collars, seeped over their shoulders, and entered their boots.

  The ground turned soft, sucked at their boots, and drained their energy. The branches that brushed their shoulders, the vines they slashed in two, and the knee-high foliage all conspired to deliver even more water to their moisture-laden clothing. And, as though that weren’t bad enough, many of the local life forms seemed energized by the afternoon soaking. The hopped, slithered, and swung from branch to branch.

  Hebo knew the point position was dangerous, knew he was showing off, but couldn’t help himself. Drang was so pleasant, so much like Hive, that he felt at home. Maybe that’s why he missed the vine viper, mistook the reptile for one of the green runners that dangled from the canopy, and whacked at it with his machete. Not edge on, which might have killed the creature, but with the flat of the blade, which served to make it angry.

  The snake, which hung head down, released its grip on a branch twenty feet over the Ramanthian’s head, allowed the full weight of its long sinuous body to fall on the officer’s torso, and struck for the alien’s neck.

  The lactic would have worked on a frog, or on a human, but not on a jungle-evolved Ramanthian. Fangs grated on dark brown chitin, tool arms grabbed a section of the viper’s body, and a razor-sharp beak slashed through skin and muscle.

  The reptile reacted with understandable violence. It whipped coils of rockhard flesh around the Ramanthian’s thorax and started to squeeze.

  Seebo, true to the DNA for which his ancestor had been chosen, took immediate action. Not because he had developed a sudden fondness for geeks, but because he was who he was, and couldn’t stand idly by.

  The human’s assault weapon was useless, not unless he wanted to kill Hebo as well, so the clone drew his combat knife, threw himself into the fray, and grabbed a thigh-thick section of the viper’s muscular body. The blade had two edges, one straight, the other equipped with sawtike teeth. It was the second that proved most effective as Seebo sawed through the red-tinged white meat. Hebo made a note of the human’s attack, felt the snake shudder in response, and knew it was distracted. That being the case, the Ramanthian felt for the short sword that projected up over his right shoulder, pressed a button on the hilt, and felt the weapon come to life. The force blade made a sizzling sound as it burned through the reptile’s flesh. The viper’s head bounced off the jungle floor, the body gave one last convulsion and finally lay still. Mondulo stepped over a section of the long serpentine body and said, “Good thing it was only half grown,” and took the point.

  Seebo started to laugh, Hebo made strange popping sounds, and Booly shook his head in wonder. It wasn’t the kind of bonding he had envisioned—but something was better than nothing. Dinner looked a lot like lunch, hell, it was exactly like lunch, which suited Mondulo just fine. The jungle offered enough variety, and it was nice to deal with something you could count on. The noncom stirred the stroganoff with the dp of his combat knife and watched his charges prepare for the night. The Ramanthian turned out to be one heck of a tree climber, which came as something of a surprise and made the noncom just a little uneasy. The bugs were allies today—but how ‘bout tomorrow? Fighting an army of Hebos in a triple-canopy jungle would be a nasty business. Still, a rough and ready sort of teamwork had emerged, which was the point of the exercise.

  MorlaKa whacked trees down with five or six blows of his machete, Seebo cut the resulting poles into sections, and Hebo carried them aloft. That’s where Booly took the raw materials, made some modifications, and added them to the steadily growing platform. He used a timber hitch to get started, followed by square lashings to secure the basic framework.

  Then, when that task was complete, he tied a series of forty man-harness hitches into a doubled piece of rope, passed sturdy sticks through the matching loops, and pulled them tight. The result was a crude but serviceable ladder. Not a necessity where he, Seebo, and Mondulo were concerned, and useless for a body like Hebo’s, but a courtesy for the Hudathan. It creaked when MorlaKa made his way upward, but it held and was easy to hoist up onto the platform.

  Once everyone was in place and the humans had smeared their bodies with Drang-specific insect repellent, it was time to eat. Mondulo stood guard as the officers grumbled over their rations, the day creatures went into hiding, and the night hunters started to emerge. The first hint of their presence was heard rather than seen. There were the clicks, pops, and buzzing noises associated with the local insect population, quickly followed by the grunts, howls, and occasional screeches made by higher lifeforms. All of which made Booly glad that they were up off the jungle floor. He finished his meal, used some water from a canteen to speed the last lump on its way, and let his weight rest on a tree trunk. The moon was up, and that, combined with a hole in the canopy, provided some light to see by.

  Seebo and Hebo were reliving their battle with the snake, while Mondulo sat with eyes closed, and MorlaKa cleaned his assault weapon. It was strange how the trip into the jungle had served to transform these officers into regular troops. Nowhere was that more visible than in the way they talked. The conversation was about the day’s adventures, about the food, and presumably, when he stepped out of earshot, about what an asshole he was. Because if there’s anything grunts like to do, it’s bitch about the command structure, which in their case came down to one single individual. Booly felt an insect land on his cheek, swatted, and knew it had escaped. A tree dweller screeched and was answered from a long way off. Seebo said something to the Ramanthian, who made the popping noises that equated to laughter.

  So, Booly asked himself, which one of them should I designate as second in command? Which one can the Confederacy count on? Seebo? Because he’s human? MorlaKa because he isn’t? Hebo as a compromise? No, those were political considerations. The one I choose should be the best leader available—and to hell with the way they’re packaged.

  The thought served to remind him of his own mixed ancestry, of the fact that some people would regard his command structure as something of a freak show, a thought that struck him as funny. Booly laughed. Seebo looked at Hebo, MorlaKa looked up from his weapon, and Mondulo opened a single eye. The old man was a nutcase but what else was new? Officers were weird, and sergeants, who served as the Legion’s backbone, would never be able to understand them.

  Something made a gibbering sound. A cloud cloaked the moon. The noncom smiled and drifted off to sleep.

  Drik floated just beneath the surface of the dark, murky water. It was thick with algae, sediment, and hundreds of tiny lifeforms all vying for their share of the swamp-born soup. Air bladders located beneath his armpits allowed the warrior to control the extent of his buoyancy. That being the case, he could hang suspended in the water for hours or even days should that become necessary. But it wouldn’t be necessary—not unless his senses had suddenly decided to betray him. A flock of flyers had fluttered into the air moments before. A school of swamp darters had propelled themselves toward deeper water, and he could feel an alien presence. None of the clan members had ever asked him about such impressions, since they had them too, but a xenoanthropologist would have been interested in the fact that while some portion of the data required to generate them flowed from “normal”

  sensory input, the rest stemmed from something else, which if not telepathy, was somehow related. In any case, Drik “felt” the aliens approach, could distinguish between different personas, and, had he been allowed to observe them for a longer period of time, might have been able to describe their various emotions.

  His emotions were clear. The offworlders had murdered members of his clan, poisoned the planet’s wate
r, and interfered with the Great Mother’s plan. The crimes were clear—and so was the punishment: death.

  Booly smelled the swamp long before he actually saw it. The damp, slightly malodorous scent of decayed plant life, combined with the stink of stagnant water, sent invisible tendrils into the jungle as if to warn of the terrain ahead.

  That being the case, the legionnaire was far from surprised when his machete slashed through the final screen of vegetation to reveal a broadly shelving mud bank and an expanse of coppery brown water backed by a stand of what Booly remembered as sponge trees, tall woody tubes that contained membranes through which swamp water was continually filtered. Nutrients were removed, waste products were added, and what remained oozed into the estuary.

  Booly scanned the area for danger, failed to identify any, and moved to one side. MoriaKa stepped forward, followed by Mondulo, Seebo, and Hebo. The latter shuffled backward, his world divided into hundreds of images.

  The noncom squinted into the brighter light, directed a stream of spit into the toffee-colored water, and removed a grenade from one of his cargo pockets. The pin had been pulled, and the object was high in the air before Booly managed to spit the words out. “Sergeant, what the hell are you ... ?”

  An explosion, followed by a geyser of momentarily white water, served to punctuate the sentence. “Just some reconnaissance by fire, sir. Stir things up, see what’s what, if ya know what I mean.”

  Booly swallowed his anger. “So much for keeping our presence secret.”

  Mondulo looked surprised. “Secret? Beggin’ the general’s pardon, but we ain’t got no fraxin’ secrets. The frogs know where we are and what we’ve been doin’. Well, not what we’re doin’, since that wouldn’t make any sense to a frog, but what they think we’re doin’, which is stompin’ all over the Great Mother’s sacred body and pissin’ on her face. The slimy bastards are out there all right—the only question is where.”