Their Master's war

by Mick Farren

  As well as shock and gloom there was a carelessness about the twenty. Men trudged forward with their weapons held loosely at their sides. Some bunched up, and others straggled. The communicators murmured with low-voiced, sullen conversations, but Elmo did nothing to keep them either alert or together. Helot and Dacker caught up with Hark.

  "So what did you make of that?" Helot asked.

  "I'm trying not to think about it," Hark replied.

  "You figure they've built a new kind of chiba?" Dacker suggested.

  Hark shook his head. "I don't know. I don't know why the Yal should bother. They kill us, we kill them. Why would they need to mess with us after we're dead?"

  "If those guys were dead when they messed with them," Dacker said.

  "Goddamm it, don't say that. That's what I've really been trying not to think about," Helot said.

  "Maybe it is a psych program," Hark suggested.

  "If it is, it's like Renchett said. It's sure as hell working," Helot returned.

  "Who do you think those guys were?" Helot asked.

  Hark shrugged. "Advance patrol, maybe."

  "The whole bloody thing gives me the creeps. I mean, that shit that was done with their dicks, sticking them in their mouths like that, somebody really knew how to get to us. How did some alien know about that shit? Huh?" Dacker shook his head.

  "You want to hear something really weird?" Hark said.

  "How weird can it get?" Helot put in.

  "When I first saw those bodies, this thought came straight out of nowhere. I thought, Men have got to have done this. It was so close to home that it had to be men who done it."

  "You're crazy. You saying our own people did that?" Dacker sounded incredulous.

  "I ain't saying nothing. I just had this thought." "You are crazy." "Who ain't, in all this?"

  Helot cracked his mask and spit. "I never thought I'd hear myself saying this, but I'd almost welcome some action. At least it'd be something else to think about."

  "And you're calling me crazy?"

  Within forty minutes, Helot got his wish. As action went, it was minor. A small gang of miggies erupted out of the ground mold, scrabbling up from where they'd buried themselves or been buried, digging themselves out with their multiple claw-ended legs and throwing chemical fire from the heaters on the tops of their squat disk-shaped bodies. There were twelve of them in all. Miggies usually came in groups of twelve. It might have been because they had twelve legs. Fortunately, there was only one group. Miggies' fire was singularly unpleasant. It didn't simply destroy-it clung and burned, and the suits were able to offer little or no protection. It spread white flame over a man until the body was completely consumed. As the first ones surfaced, Renchett yelled a warning, but it was too late. The two men immediately behind him, both new meat, were hit. The twenty opened up with a roar, blowing the scuttling machine creatures to flying component fragments. One of the recruits was dying slowly and painfully as the relentless flame spread outward from his left shoulder. His screams echoed in everyone's helmet even after they had stopped firing.

  The miggies didn't have the intelligence to take evasive action. Their single strategy was a combination of concealment and surprise. They broke cover and they fired, but after that they were almost totally vulnerable. The firefight was all over in less than three minutes with no further human casualties. The last miggie left intact tried to bury itself back in the mold. Hark stood over it and reduced it to vapor with a single extended blast. As he destroyed it, he felt some of the tension draining out of him.

  The twenty, now reduced to seventeen, stood white-faced and breathless with their suit-enhanced adrenaline pumping, turning and staring into the shadows beneath the fungus, looking for a follow-up to the first attack. All too often, a burst out of miggies would merely be the preliminary to a major attack by chibas. But the minutes passed and nothing happened; the men relaxed, and the suits cut back on their output of stimulants. The familiar sense of postcombat letdown started to set in. One by one, they lowered their weapons. The miggies must have been nothing more than an isolated irritant, left behind to slow the human advance. When Elmo gave the order to move on, he sounded exhausted. The dead were left behind. They were mainly ash-there wasn't enough of either of them left to bury or to carry to the next temporary base. Hark hadn't even learned their names.

  Light showed up ahead between the growths of fungus in what had to be the burned area where the dynes had destroyed the Yal firetower. The growing babble of other short-range communication in their helmets confirmed it. This was the twenty's rendezvous point with the rest of the task force. Tired as they were, the troopers quickened their pace. Hot food and sleep were almost in sight. In the burned area, they would eat and make camp for the planet's strange half night. It was unlikely that the enemy would attempt anything more than a probe of the perimeter when the whole Therem battle group was assembled in one spot. Of course, the next day they would press on again, back in the stinking vegetation, but nobody thought about that. Out in the bush, they tried to live strictly in the present. A completed day was a completed day. Each man could take some comfort in his continued survival.

  As they emerged from the jungle, there was something disorienting about the light and space. The sun was dropping to the horizon, and very soon the huge parent planet would fill the sky. The black charred area was a crowded chaos of activity. Everything was converging on the same point at once. Gunsaucers were coming in to land, throwing up huge clouds of dust like miniature thunderheads. Nohans and human sappers were digging foxholes and bunkers, creating their own dust clouds. Others were rigging the perimeter, the traps and the wire and the disintegration fields. The wounded were being loaded onto e-vacs, and the dead were being incinerated in one huge pit. Above it, smoke mixed with the black dust. The sunlight filtering through was turned a bloody red. The three towering dynes were attempting to raise their fallen comrade, droning at each other in their deep, resonant language. While the twenty had been in among the fungus, amphibious armored crawlers had come upriver, bringing supplies and replacement troops. They had clawed their way up the bank and were now being unloaded. In the middle of it all, two red spheres floated close to the ground, right beside the ruins of the Yal tower. It was just as if they were observing the whole operation.

  The combat twenties coming in from the bush seemed somehow out of place amid all these flurries of preparation. They had yet to be told what to do. They crunched aimlessly across the fused earth and black flake ash hoping for a topman to assign them to a bivouac area. Their mood was rapidly deteriorating. The field kitchens, always an obvious goal, were being set up but had not yet opened for business. The nohans seemed to have been quicker off the mark. Lines of the armored aliens were already forming in front of the tall tubular devices that prepared their nourishment. This caused a certain noisy resentment among the troopers. The nohans never actually fought except in the most dire emergency, and the men saw it as a positive injustice that they should get to eat, or whatever they did that passed for eating, before the human fighting men. Elmo tried to stop these complaints in his twenty, but the troopers simply ignored him. Dacker was the first one to lose patience with this purposeless tramping across the assembly area. He threw down his MEW and faced Elmo.

  "If you can't find us a place to set up camp, why don't you go look for someone who can?"

  Renchett joined in. "Yeah, Elmo, why don't you go find Rance? A report's got to be put in on those bodies. Do something useful for a change instead of busting our chops."

  Elmo turned on them. "You two watch your mouths. You're back in the world of discipline now," he snarled.

  Dacker waved a dismissive hand at the milling men and machinery. "It looks like it, don't it?"

  Renchett shook his head. "One little nuke could take out all of this lot."

  "Lucky they don't have any, ain't it?"

  "You never know; they might come up with one."

  "At least it'd be quick."
>
  "Cut that out!" Elmo tried again.

  "Quit trying to prove it, Elmo. We've had enough of your dickhead blustering."

  "You bastards…" Elmo's voice was shaking.

  Renchett pushed his helmet close to Elmo's visor. "What are you going to do, Elmo? Threaten to burn us down again? How are you going to explain it in the middle of all this?"

  "Damn you."

  There was a familiar roar in their helmets. "Something going on here?" It was Rance.

  "Tempers getting a little frayed here, Topman," Renchett answered. "It's been a long day."

  Rance halted and fell into a parade rest. He looked Renchett up and down.

  "A trooper's temper doesn't get frayed with his overman, Renchett. A trooper doesn't have a temper as far as an overman is concerned."

  Renchett snapped to an ironic half attention. "No, Topman Rance. You'll have to put it down to combat fatigue."

  "Combat fatigue, my ass."

  "Yes, Topman Rance."

  Rance turned on Elmo. "Do you want to press formal charges against this man?"

  "No, I'll deal with him."

  "Then let's get the men bedded down."

  He faced the twenty and indicated five freshly dug foxholes over on their right.

  "Four men to each hole. There'll be an inspection in thirty minutes. Dyrkin, organize a guard rota. Three of you will rotate on the perimeter, and there'll be one area watch. Now, get going."

  "There are three dead."

  "Then some of you will have more room to roll around in your sleep."

  "We'll look forward to it." "I'm sure you will, Dyrkin."

  Dyrkin led the twenty away. Rance indicated that Elmo should walk with him in the other direction. As soon as the men had gone, his whole attitude changed. There was no more grim banter. He became cold and businesslike, a man who no longer had the tune to be angry.

  "What the hell do you think you're doing?"

  Elmo was taken by complete surprise.

  "What are you talking about?"

  "I told you to lay back on the longtimers and let Dyrkin and Renchett take care of things. They can handle it. It may be news to you, but I want to keep my longtimers alive. We can't clear this forsaken planet with replacements."

  Elmo was too tightly wrapped to accept the advice. His jaw set, and he started straight ahead. "I can run my own twenty."

  "The hell you can. They're starting to look like walking corpses."

  "It was a bad day."

  "It's always a bad day in the jungle." "This was different."

  "Damn it, man, you only lost three men. Whole twenties were wiped out in the center section. What hit you?" "Miggies." "How many?" "A group of twelve." Rance's voice was like ice. "Twelve?" "Right."

  "A dozen miggies don't make a bad day." "There was something else." "What?"

  'There were these bodies."

  As far as Rance was concerned, Elmo was hanging himself out to dry.

  "There are always bodies."

  "These were different. They'd been mutilated. Deliberately."

  "Mutilated? How?"

  "The skin had been flayed off them, and their dicks had been stuffed in their mouths. It was disgusting." "You're kidding."

  "I've never seen anything like it. The men took it bad. They've started telling each other that it's some new psych program."

  Rance didn't like the sound of this at all.

  "Where was this?"

  "Back in the jungle, not too far beyond the perimeter. I fixed the spot."

  "I'll call it in. Hopefully they'll send out a data team." Rance touched a stud on the side of his helmet. "Open a command channel." He waited.

  "Patch me through to Line Officer Berref." He waited again.

  "What do you mean he's returned to the cluster? Yeah… okay."

  He glanced at Elmo. "You get a dataspot or just a fix?"

  "I took a spot."

  "The brain wants you to shoot it in." "On D-four?" "Code three."

  Elmo touched a similar stud on his helmet, activating a direct link facility that wasn't shared by the ordinary troopers. He waited a few seconds and removed his finger.

  "It's in."

  Rance was briskly final. "So that's it."

  Elmo shook his head. "I don't know."

  "Whatever they do with the information, you can be assured that you won't hear anything about it."

  "That shit was so weird."

  Rance nodded curtly. "It's out of our hands."

  Elmo looked back at where the twenty were breaking out their environ bubbles. "What do I do?"

  "You? If I had my way, I'd have you shipped back to the rear. The trouble is that I don't have my way. It's been decided that you can't be spared, and you have to lead a twenty even if you kill them all in the process. The way things are, I can't get that reversed."

  Elmo grunted. "Don't do me no favors."

  "I'm not doing you a favor. As far as I'm concerned, you didn't ought to be leading a combat twenty."

  "I'm telling you I can handle it."

  "And I'm telling you to back off. Take it as an order — don't take out your problems on your squad."

  Elmo's face was stiff and blank. "Is that all?"

  Rance sighed. "Yeah, that's all."

  Elmo turned on his heel and marched away. Rance watched him go. He seemed to be moving like a robot.

  The group of men in each foxhole had combined their individual environ bubbles and spread the resulting transparent sheet over the hole. It was anchored around the edge with rocks and dirt. Once in place, the bubbles slowly inflated until they formed a low protective dome. They also took on the coloring of the surrounding ground. The EBs were living entities, biotailored first cousins of the suits. On a planet that was a vacuum or one that had a poisonous atmosphere, the EBs sealed in an environment of canned air. In an emergency, they could also generate oxygen for the men sheltering inside them. On a planet like this one, however, where the air would have been breathable but for the contaminates and the wildlife, they actually filtered the toxins and impurities through their thick membranes.

  Structures were going up all over the assembly area. In addition to the individual foxholes, there were larger command posts and supply marquees. Some were inflatable; others were solid domes that were assembled from portable sections. It was all part of the Therem passion for overorganization. Each time the task force paused in its advance prior to the next push, it felt the need to quickly put up what amounted to a small fortified town. When the force moved on, the town would just as quickly be torn down, leaving a tangle of holes, trenches, and debris to mark its passage.

  When the foxholes were set up to everyone's satisfaction and the first guard shift was in position, the remainder of the twenty were free to attend to their most pressing personal needs. The most pressing of all was hot food. After days of living on F-rations and concentrates, any kind of cooked meal had to constitute a luxury. The cookhouse was now open, and there was almost a sense of anticipation as the men made their way to the temporary mess hall. As they eased through the bubble lock and pulled off their helmets and masks, they found that there was already a long line stretching to the serving area. Among those first on the line were some of the raw replacements who had come up on the crawlers. Dacker immediately took exception to this.

  "Will you look at this new meat? We've been out in the forsaken bush getting our asses shot off and they get to eat first when they ain't done nothing but ride up here in comfort."

  "Ain't that always the way of it?"

  "I say make 'em wait."

  Some came down on the side of being reasonable.

  "Aah, leave the poor bastards be. They're probably scared out of their minds."

  "So what the hell? I've been scared for as long as can remember, and with good reason. I'm going to t* front and get myself some food."

  Dacker defiantly started toward the head of the line. After only a moment's hesitation, the others followed, even those who ha
dn't agreed with him. As the troopers elbowed their way to the front there were a couple of protests from the new recruits, but these were quickly silenced by glares from the longtimers. One of the mess orderlies was less easily intimidated. He set down his ladle and returned Dacker's angry stare.

  "You men get back in line or you don't get served."

  "Say what?"

  "You heard me."

  Dacker leaned forward so his face was very close to the orderly's. "Now you listen to me, dickhead. Not more than sixty minutes ago I was in combat, almost overrun by chibas. In another sixty minutes, I intend to be fast asleep with a full belly. Are you telling me that I've got to waste my precious downtime waiting on line while a bunch of pussy-assed new meat get their chow in front of me? What were you doing an hour ago, watching the soup on a burner?"

  The orderly stood his ground. "The rule here is first come, first served, no exceptions. So you heroes can just get to the back of the line."

  "Can you imagine the disaster area we could make out of this place?"

  "Can you imagine what will happen to you if you start anything in here?"

  "So what can they do? Shoot us? We'll be back in combat tomorrow."

  There was complaining back down the line that quickly built in volume to curses and catcalls. No food had been served since Dacker and the others had walked to the front of the line, and the line was getting impatient. A supply overman emerged from the rear kitchen area.

  "What the hell's going on here? What's the holdup?" A steel plate that covered more than half of his forehead indicated that he was a wounded combat veteran who had been placed on light duties. The head injury made his speech a little strange, but there didn't seem to be anything wrong with his thinking. "You men just in from the bush?"