Their Master's war

by Mick Farren

  "Damn right we are."

  He glanced at the orderly. "Go ahead, feed 'em and get the whole bunch out of the way."

  The orderly started to protest, but the overman stopped him with a look. "Just get them out of here."

  Dacker grinned. "Just get us out of here."

  The orderly scowled but started slopping out the food.

  As Hawk walked back down the line with his full tray, he couldn't help looking into the faces of the new intake. Poor little bleeders. They were like blank pages waiting to be written on. Sure, they were afraid, but that was it-no marks, no scars. Their skins were smooth and unblemished, and there was nothing in their eyes but ap prehension. He thought back to when he had been like that. It seemed like a lifetime ago.

  The sun dropped behind the hills, and the river valley sank into deep shadow. The lights came on around the perimeter. The minutes after sunset were the darkest of the whole half night. Then the huge parent planet would start to rise beyond the opposite horizon. At first the giant world was nothing more than a thin luminous band, a second horizon with a slight curve on the leading edge. Rapidly, though, it grew and grew, filling up the sky with its enormous bulk and casting a bright twilight over the jungle that turned the fungus ghostly pale. The planet was an expanse of parchment-yellow banded with strips of red, orange, and purple that slowly twisted and rippled and spiraled into great ponderous vortices as they were driven by the unimaginably violent storms that tore through its deep, dense atmosphere.

  The night sounds began, dominated by the booming moan of the big green lizards. The big lizards seemed to make a nocturnal practice of raising their long necks to the sky and baying at the planet. It wasn't an unusual sight to see four or five of them, with necks intertwined and heads raised in unison, moaning together as a group. Above and around their bellows, the smaller creatures shrieked and howled. One particular species-nobody was quite sure which because nobody'd actually seen it-had become a particular favorite of the ground forces. It made a croaking noise that could be approximated by the word "walleye." Isolated troopers had taken to duplicating the cry. With surreal bravado, they'd yell back into the night.

  "Walleye!"

  "Walleye!"

  Already the call of this jungle campaign was echoing around the perimeter. "Walleye."

  "Walleye."

  With Dyrkin giving out the details, none of the old-timers had pulled guard duty. When he'd finished eating, Hark found that although exhausted, he wasn't ready to sleep. He wanted to be on his own for a while. That was also something of a luxury. He slipped on his mask, not bothering with his helmet, and wriggled out of the bubble. He felt a little dizzy-Renchett and Kemlo were inside the foxhole sharing a small vial of totally illegal sweet gas. He turned his back on the big planet. It tended to hang over everything like a great psychological weight, and the last thing Hark needed was any kind of additional burden. He walked slowly as far as a parked crawler and sat down on one of its rear treads. To the east, there was a red glow beyond the hills. It might have been an erupting volcano. This young planet was made even more unstable by the clutching gravity of the big mother. On the other hand, it could have been flying wings, firestorming a section of jungle. Somewhere on the perimeter there was a brief chatter of fire. Hark looked around but didn't react in any other way. There had been a time when he. would have jumped and grabbed for his weapon. Now he waited until he was called. The hell with it. It was probably just some piece of new meat shooting at shadows.

  It was all becoming a matter of time-time in the jungle, time lying in a foxhole trying to sleep but not to dream. The passage of time was marked by the missing faces, all the faces that had started together but had vanished one by one. There was no point in pretending that he wouldn't one day become one of those faces. That was the ultimate matter of time. He wished that some bootleg had surfaced in the temporary camp. Sweet gas didn't do it for him, but alcohol could be trusted to take him away from the war for some unconscious minutes.

  "Feeling like baying at the moon?" Dyrkin had come silently around the side of the crawler.

  Hark shrugged. "Haven't gotten around to it yet, but there are times when it feels tempting."

  The walleye creature croaked, and there was a chorus of shouts from the perimeter. Dyrkin shook his head. "At least you haven't started hollering 'walleye.'"

  "I never did think it was a good idea to start advertising my position."

  'There are those who just have to do it. I guess it helps convince them that they exist."

  "I never had that problem."

  "You mind if I sit down?"

  "Help yourself."

  Dyrkin sat next to Hark on the tread and produced a small metal flask. "You want a belt?"

  Hark nodded. "Sure do. You want to step inside? Renchett and Kemlo are getting out of their brains in our foxhole."

  Dyrkin shook his head. "We can drink out here as long as you don't breathe in."

  In one smooth motion, he flipped up his mask, took a pull on the flask himself, replaced the mask, and handed the flask to Hark.

  Hark repeated the process with equal skill; then he swallowed and shuddered. "Bootleg gets worse and worse."

  "I hear they're making it from fungus and defoliant." "It tastes like it."

  Hark passed the flask back, and Dyrkin took a second swig. For a while they sat in silence, then Dyrkin passed the flask again.

  "You know something?"

  Hark shuddered again. "What?"

  "You've come a long way since that first day on the messdeck when I beat you up."

  "I guess I have." Hark thought for a moment. "I've wondered about that. How come you picked on me?"

  "I always have to beat up one of a new intake. It's part of the system. It's called imprinting."

  "But why me?"

  "You looked like you could take it." Hark laughed. It wasn't something that he did particularly often.

  "There's plenty of taking it in this game." "That's all there is."

  The two men sat in silence again, just drinking and staring into the night. Finally Dyrkin coughed.

  "You still seem pretty good at taking it."

  "Don't have too much choice."

  Hark found that he was copying the topgun's slow, economical speech pattern. Dyrkin didn't show that he noticed.

  "You don't even seem to be letting Elmo get to you." "If you want my opinion," Hark said, "I think he's going to kill us all."

  "And it don't bother you."

  "Sure it bothers me. It bothers me a lot, but since there ain't a forsaken thing that I can do about it, I try not to let him stress me out."

  "Back when I was new on the Hyma /, the old-timers used to talk about what they called learning the calm. I guess that's what you've done. Learned the calm. Only you call it not letting it stress you out."

  Hark didn't say anything. Dyrkin had to be leading up to something even if he was taking his sweet time getting to it. Dyrkin looked up at the sky and then directly at Hark.

  "We may need a whole lot of calm pretty soon." "You figure it's going to be hairy tomorrow?" "I not only figure it's going to be hairy tomorrow, but I also didn't like those bodies today. They could be the start of something new and bad." Dyrkin paused. "That's not all, though."

  "I kind of thought it wasn't."

  "If something has to be done about Elmo, we're going to need all the calm we can get."

  "Are you telling me something?"

  Dyrkin looked Hark straight in the eye. "Just making an observation."

  He rubbed the steel prosthesis between his hand and elbow.

  "Still have feeling in the damn thing after all this time." He stood up. "I'm going to get some sleep. Like I said, I have a feeling it's going to be hairy tomorrow."

  As Dyrkin walked away, Hark was grateful for the alcohol that was warming his system. There was a chill coming down.

  Thirteen

  The Yal forces hit them well before the sun was due up. The first sign
of attack was a glowing green energy cloud that rose at the head of the valley and then drifted slowly downriver. Its appearance threw the base into alarm and quite a degree of panic. When it sank to the ground, it would vaporize anything beneath it-and it was coming straight at the base. Some men ran to their battle stations, and others just ran. Still more merely stood and stored at the deadly cloud as if mesmerized by it. Inside the domes and the foxholes, men were struggling into their equipment. Anti-Air Defense was hastily readied. Noncoms bellowed and screamed at their twenties. A handful of recruits threw themselves flat, trying to dig down into the burned earth. Everyone who had a helmet on was deafened by a cacophony of cross-communication and the roaring static that was generated by the approaching cloud. A number of gunsaucers were burning fuel, warming up prior to lifting.

  The AADs opened up, splitting the sky with violet streaks of fire. The dynes were also coming alive. Their eyes glowed as they powered up their weapon systems. The cloud was getting close. The dynes also started fir ing. Multiple energy flares flashed from their eyes and ripped into the cloud. It seemed to slow as every heavy weapon on the base poured fire into it. A ragged cheer from the men followed a series of explosions inside the cloud. It started to fragment. Portions of it sank down into jungle that was immediately consumed by blinding white light. Other parts touched down on the surface of the river and were transformed into roaring gushers of j superheated steam.

  The outpouring of fire from the base wasn't, however, completely effective. A small green fireball from the heart of the cloud, probably the fragment that contained the motivator, plunged on, losing height but making directly for the base. It hit at the very edge of the perimeter, and the white fire blossomed upward. Men on the extreme margins of the blast staggered away screaming, their backpods melting and their bodies trailing clouds of smoke from their charred suits. Others were blown apart when the energy packs on their MEWs exploded. A squad of nohans were cooked inside their armor. First one and then two more gunsaucers blew up where they stood. One managed to get into the air before the fireball hit, but the shock wave caught it and flipped it over. It crashed into the jungle and started a fire of its own.

  The white fire on the perimeter seemed to have been the signal for the chibas. They came in their thousands, wailing the nerve-jangling chorus of high electric trills that always accompanied their mass attacks. Their losses were horrendous. Without hesitation, the first wave plunged straight into the mines, the wire, and the fixed line autos. They were mown down in their hundreds. Some lost limbs to the wire and continued to drag themselves forward, firing as they went. When they finally failed, the ones behind charged straight over them. The chiba bodies were piled up so high in front of the buffer fields that they simply shorted out and collapsed. There was no instinct of self-preservation in the goop that passed as chibas' brains, just a relentless, almost mind-lass hostility that kept them coming and coming, breaking out through the fungus, pounding across the open pace beyond the perimeter with their strange mechanii il run and then hurling themselves into the defenses. I hey must have been massing under cover of the jungle all through the night. The longtimers couldn't believe that there hadn't been patrols sent out. Were the medians really that confident? Not that the longtimers, or uny of the other troopers, had much time to ponder tactics. To the last man, they had their hands full holding hack the onrushing lines of chibas. Even the cookhouse help and the walking wounded found themselves with weapons in their hands, formed into makeshift combat teams and pushed into foxholes. Their only hope of saving their lives was to keep up a withering stream of fire until their weapons threatened to melt.

  The hot spot was where the energy fragment had burned a gaping hole in the set-piece defenses. The chibas had moved directly up to the still blazing fires. Briefly, they'd halted. Specialists had come forward, spraying the molten ground with liquid nitrogen until all fires had gone and it was black slag covered with a thick layer of frost. The defenders had picked off dozens of them, but the enemy seemed to have an inexhaustible supply of every variety of chiba.

  "Where the hell did they get these numbers?"

  "And how did they assemble them without us hearing them?"

  "The bastards can be quiet as the grave when they want to be."

  As the first horde of chibas came streaming through the gap, Rance had led his twenties in a fast flanking movement against them. It wasn't that he had any desire to be a hero, but he was in the right place and the break through had to be halted. If the chibas weren't stopped, they'd be all over the interior of the base, and everyone in it would be cut to pieces. He knew how deadly a chiba horde could be when it got in among a disorganized and uncoordinated enemy. His first objective was a system of shallow trenches on the right of the gap. There was no one in them, their original occupants having burned, but they had remained largely intact. They were an ideal position from which to direct fire at the chibas coming through the gap. There was one snag. Between his men and the trenches, there was an open expanse of bare ground that was being raked by a PBA that the chibas had brought in with them. He could make it to the trenches okay, but he'd certainly lose up to a third of his men in the process. That was hardly the object of the exercise. He looked wildly around for another solution. The big planet was setting and soon the sun would be coming up, but for the moment, it was getting darker. The irregular green flashes from the PBA and the multicolors of the scattered return fire seemed doubly bright. He spotted a crawler some distance behind them, maneuvering aimlessly. He prayed that his communicator could cut through all the conflicting noises.

  "Crawler nine, crawler nine! I need your help to plug that hole in the perimeter."

  After a short but agonizing pause, there was a voice in his helmet. "This is crawler nine, we hear you."

  "This is Topman Rance. I have my twenties up ahead of you. I need you to give me cover across that open space."

  "We have you on scope, Topman Rance. We're moving up."

  The armored hulk grated toward them on its huge treads. Rance waved his men back.

  "Fall in behind the crawler! Use it as cover."

  The men didn't need urging more than once. Crouch ing low, they bunched up behind the big machine as it moved into the open space, dragging its bulk laboriously forward like some monster metal crustacean. One man wasn't fast enough. He was caught in the open by chiba lire. The top half of his body was smeared over the side of the crawler, while his legs and hips, quite untouched, fell back, still kicking. The crawler immediately came under fire from the PBA. Where the particle beams hit, spots on its high-density armor briefly glowed red, but it suffered no other damage. Its prow guns opened up, and the PBA was silenced. The chibas started to fall back, letreating through the gap. Rance's twenties were now level with the trenches.

  "Quick! Move it! Get down in that trench system."

  Some of the men were reluctant to leave the shelter of the crawler, but with Rance behind them they had no c hoice. Quickly, a hundred men were down on their bellies, worming their way along the trench system. The crawler commander's voice crackled over Rance's communicator.

  "I'm going to pull back. If they bring up a punisher, I'm dead meat at this range."

  "Thanks for the assist, crawler nine." "You're welcome."

  Rance gripped his weapon and slid into the trench. If they brought up a punisher, everyone in the area would be dead meat, but presumably a piece of heavy armor was worth more than his men. Certainly his men were more replaceable.

  "Look alive! Spread out along the trenches! The chibas will be pushing back again as soon as the crawler pulls out."

  "Why the fuck can't it stay and give us covering fire?" "Shut up, Renchett."

  The chibas were streaming back into the gap, but the fire from the trenches at least temporarily checked them.

  A gunsaucer ran fast and low along the perimeter line, strafing the attackers, but then it flipped up as it ran into return fire from the ground. The dynes had also moved in
to action. Towering over the base, they were unable to do anything about the intense fighting around their feet. The risk of hitting their own men was too high. Instead, they pumped fire into the surrounding jungle in the hope of destroying any Yal reserves that were still waiting to move up. Although temporarily taken by surprise, the Therem forces were quickly responding. The perimeter was holding, and the chibas were taking terrible losses. Then the ground around the trenches beg^n to shake violently.

  "Motherfuck, they're pushing a thumper at us!"

  There were muffled screams in everyone's helmet as a section of trench collapsed and five men were buried alive. Rance was immediately yelling into his communicator.

  "Don't panic! Breathe normally and dig yourselves out."

  Three men struggled out of the loose dirt. Two didn't. They had either panicked themselves into shock or lost their masks in the cave-in and suffocated. The ground shook again. Another section collapsed, but this time no one was buried. The longtimers had their trenchers out, ready to dig if necessary.

  "That thing's got to be stopped!"

  Rance opened a command channel. "This is Topman Rance requesting an air strike."

  "State your position, Topman Rance."

  Rance's voice was calm and by the book. "I'm at the gap in the perimeter. I have the enemy contained, but they're using a thumper against me, and my trenches are collapsing."

  "Your air strike is being ordered."

  The ground vibrated for a full five seconds. The tremor was more intense than the previous one. The firing faltered as dozens of men were freeing themselves from the loose earth that was cascading down all along the complex of trenches. "Please make it fast."

  A dozen or so chibas were through the gap and racing toward the trenches. They were cut down only a few meters from the first trench. Rance quickly scanned the sky. Where the hell was the air strike? Had the goddamn saucer jocks chickened out on him? A couple more tremors and the chibas would be in among them. Finally he spotted the aircraft. Two saucers were running fast from the other side of the base with sunguns blazing down at the ground. They swept over the twenty's position and out beyond the perimeter, then they turned and came back. They made two more passes before the command channel came alive.