by John Ringo
The tenar would never fit into the trench, so, reluctant to dismount, the Kessentai ordered over a normal and made the signs for the normal to bring him the body. Somewhat reluctantly and fearfully, the normal obeyed. These things they fought were frightful. Who knew what evil designs they had worked into their own systems of fortification? Even so, God Kings ordered and normals obeyed. It was in the nature of the universe. The normal found a zigzag in the trench system and jumped in.
Naturally, the normal sniffed the body. It did smell odd but then everything on this miserable planet smelled odd. It didn't look for trip wires but that didn't matter as there were no trip wires on the threshkreen's body. The normal bent over and dug its claws into the corpse, giving one great heave to lift the body to where its god could take charge of it.
When the body was lifted there was a small bang, nothing so profound as the explosions that had danced among the People all day. Too quick for the normal's eye to see, a cylinder, about six inches across and nine or so high, bounded upward.
The Kessentai saw the cylinder, for the briefest moment, before it exploded. At this range, literally dozens of pieces of steel, some round, some jagged, tore into the God King's body. He had barely time to register that agony before the det cord went off, detonating in turn several pounds of plastic explosive. It was not clear to the God King which it was that killed him, as he was turned into so much gas too quickly. Several dozen of the pellets struck the tenar and of these at least three hit the controls for the containment unit for the tenar's antimatter power pack. This immediately failed.
There was a blindingly bright flash to the east.
Though he was some miles away as the shock wave hit, it still took Binastarion several long moments as he fought for control of his tenar before he realized what it was that he was seeing. His Artificial Sentience announced, "Antimatter explosion, lord. I am attempting to analyze what caused it."
"The never-sufficiently-to-be-damned humans caused it!" the Kessentai snarled.
"Well . . . yes, lord," the AS admitted. "But how is the question. I have a suspicion the threshkreen have begun laying traps on the bodies they leave behind. The loss from this one, if it was a trap, far exceeds any nutrition we might harvest from all the human bodies found so far in the line."
Binastarion scowled. "Issue orders in my name: the humans' corpses are to be left unharvested until they can be properly searched and, if necessary, disarmed."
"This will play hell with logistics, lord," the AS answered. "But . . . it is done."
"I hate humans."
"Speaking of which, lord," the AS continued, "something has been disturbing me."
"And that would be?"
"I can't find the metal threshkreen. I lost them a while ago but didn't think much of it. Now we have fought the humans again. You would have expected the metal threshkreen to be involved, at least in covering their breaking contact with us. But, no, there's been not a peep."
"They could have been pulled off-world," Binastarion commented, reasonably. "Or even back to their homeland to the north of here."
"It's possible, lord."
* * *
"Good Lord A'mighty." Sergeant Quijana saw the rising mushroom cloud, a comparatively small one, from the battle position his company had assumed to continue their delay of the enemy. He wondered for a moment, then pulled out his map and compass.
From this position . . . azimuth of . . . two hundred and seventy-eight degrees . . . mmmm . . .
"Get some, Gonzo."
Interlude
Guanamarioch, a low ranking member of a clan not even powerful enough to defend its newly won lands from other Posleen clans larger, wealthier or more aggressive, found himself stuck with the most miserable job he could ever have imagined. Not for him the soaring in his tenar, high and free, above the ugly, miserable, stinking, green fester pit the locals called "the Darien." Oh, no. That was the province of the higher caste Kessentai. His tenar floated on automatic above the jungle overhead while he, instead, found himself on the ground, leading several hundred poorly armed, genetically marginal normals struggling through knee-deep, slimy, clinging muck.
Oh, well. At least Zira is here to keep me company.
Not that the muck was so bad. At least where the muck covered Guano's body the local flying insect life—they were called "mosquitoes"—couldn't get at him.
The problem was that the rain, incessantly pounding on the thick jungle roof overhead, then dripping down from the leaves and vines, washed the coating away. And where there was no muck, there were the mosquitoes.
There were little ones, big ones, medium ones. One and all, little or big, they were voracious. The little ones, especially, hurt when their sharp probosci jabbed Guano's open flesh. Surprisingly, the larger varieties' bites didn't hurt as much as the smaller but they, like their tiny cousins, left behind an insatiable itch. They left behind, too, a swelling that built up as more and more of the damned insects sank their probes into already swollen flesh.
Guano looked left to where one of his band was being led through the steaming jungle by a superior normal. The poor creature's eyes had been swollen shut by repeated attacks from kamikaze anopheles.
Though the rain stripped the Posleen of their protecting mud, it also drove the mosquitoes to cover. Unfortunately, whenever the rain stopped the bugs came out again with a vengeance to rape and pillage the Posleen horde before more mud could be applied. And even once re-covered with muck, the mosquitoes' bites itched horribly underneath.
"This can't go on, you know, Guano," announced Ziramoth. "These little flying devils are sucking better than three measures of nutrient transportation fluid out of each member of the host every cycle."
The God King half expanded his crest then relaxed it, the Posleen equivalent of a shrug.
"It grows back," he said.
"It grows back indeed," agreed the Kenstain, "if you and your band get enough food and water. Water is, of course, no problem. Here is all the water the host might desire . . . and more. Food, on the other hand . . ."
"Food," Guano agreed. Yes, water we have in remarkable abundance.
The clan had started their unwilling trek packing light, fleeing in near panic from an overwhelming surprise assault by three neighboring clans. They'd expected to find food en route. Unfortunately, the local animals for the most part fled the host en masse. The animals that did not tended to be small; so small, in fact, that a single hit from a railgun or blast from a shotgun was usually enough to leave little more than some scrawny and unnourishing feet, and a thin mist of blood, flesh, skin and fur floating on the breeze.
"The foraging is poor," the God King added.
"I doubt it's going to get much better, either," Zira replied. "I sense no teeming of any life within any useful distance that would worth eating. Not since that village of primitive brown threshkreen your band hit three cycles ago."
"That was good eating," Guano agreed. "But it didn't last long."
Guanamarioch could still almost smell the blood, fresh and hot, from the abattoir he and his band had made of that brown threshkreen village.
It had been a normal enough foraging expedition. A pair of scouts had returned to the main body of the Posleen band and signaled the presence of food in fair abundance. The normals, of course, could not count. Even had they been able to count, they were, frankly, too stupid to relate that count in intelligible speech. Instead they had used hand signals and body language—the motion of hands to muzzles, the shaking of heads as if tearing meat from bones, the lifting of muzzles skyward as if bolting down raw chunks of thresh, then the patting of flanks in simulated satiety—to indicate their find. Lastly, the senior of the two normals held palms apart at a certain distance to indicate the size of the find.
Guanamarioch measured the distance from palm to palm with his eyes, coming up with the answer, about four hundred thresh, give or take.
The thresh of this area, the God King knew, ran small. Still, the quan
tity indicated would be enough to feed his pack for several days, at the very least. He signaled his party to move to the feast, the two original scouts leading.
The trek to the village of thresh had not been especially long, but the water and the muck had made it more than ordinarily difficult. This was made even worse, once the scouts signaled that the village was near, by the need to keep silent lest any of the thresh escape.
At a point several hundred yards shy of the outskirts Guanamarioch stationed himself. From there two encircling arms of Posleen, led by superior normals of Guano's pack, reached out in a loving embrace.
Both Posleen tendrils reached the river on the far side of the thresh village at about the same time. The God King knew this from a sort of joy-filled shuddering that swept back to him from the leading superior normals. He withdrew his boma blade from its scabbard and was about to signal the attack when a strange thing happened. The normal next to him gave a soft, inarticulate cry and looked stupidly at Guano before dropping to his knees. From the creatures breast sprouted a length of what appeared to Guano to be wood.
"AS," the God King asked, "what was that?"
"What was what?" the Artificial Sentience responded. "I sense nothing."
Faintly, out of one eye, Guano spotted an indefinable streak moving fast through the jungle. He ducked just in time for the streak to miss him, hitting instead a tree just behind.
"That, you electronic dunce. What was that?" Guano indicated the thin sliver of wood quivering in the tree.
"Primitive weapon, of a kind not used by the People in uncounted millennia," the AS announced. "It is not ballistic and so I cannot sense it in flight. It contains little refined metal and so I cannot sense it at rest. I believe the locals call it an arrow. It is fired from a bow."
"Fat lot of help you are," the Posleen snarled, raising his railgun to the firing position.
"I work very well within design parameters," the AS countered snippily. "It is not my fault that some thresh exist below the level I was designed to sense."
Instead of answering, the God King let loose a long sweeping burst from his railgun. Vegetation exploded downrange and one forlorn cry told him that the bowman would not trouble his People in the future.
At the first firing, the rest of Guanamarioch's pack drew blades and charged. More arrows flew out, dropping a few of the host. And then the Posleen were on them.
Tiny thresh and larger ones with odd bumps on their bare chests screamed and ran in all directions. That is, they ran until reaching sight of one of the twin walls of Posleen harvesters closing on the village from both sides. At that some turned and ran back towards the center, while a few simply froze in place in open-mouthed terror until the reaping machine reached them.
Near the center, in an open-sided hut, the tiny and the oddly bumped thresh, some of them holding tiny ones in their arms, took shelter behind a lone threshkreen kneeling by a low fire and firing a rifle to the east. Guanamarioch could not tell if the threshkreen was actually hitting anything, but threats were not to be tolerated. Accompanied by a half dozen flankers the God King galloped toward the rifleman, boma blade raised high.
Chapter 29
May the forces of evil become confused
while your arrow is on its way to the target.
—George Carlin
SOUTHCOM Headquarters, the "Tunnel,"
Quarry Heights, Panama
"We could try to nuke 'em," Rivera observed while gazing at the map that showed a massive concentration of Posleen clustered at the base of the Darien on the Colombian side.
"I've asked already," General Page answered. "Even though I can't think of a single good way to get a half dozen major bombs into the area, I still asked." In a falsetto voice, obviously meant to mimic the President's, he continued, "No, General. I won't let you damage the Rain Forest. We have treaties, obligations, internal laws. I could be impeached for letting you use nuclear weapons on that part of the world."
Rivera shrugged. Oh, well. It was worth a shot. Glad the Marine at least had the balls to ask.
"What else do we know about that migration?" Page asked.
"Not much, sir. We've gotten two LRRPs"—Long Range Reconnaissance Patrols—"into the area—and lost another three trying—but all they can tell us is about the edges. Well . . . I suppose that the fact we lost three of the LRRPs trying to penetrate the edges of the infestation tells us the bastards are pretty dense on the ground."
It was Page's turn to shrug. Information in war cost; always had, always would.
"How's the Army's Fifth Infantry doing?"
Rivera's finger traced an arc running northeast to southwest on the map. "They're dug-in in a half perimeter around the end of the Inter-America Highway, where the Darien Gap begins. SF teams are out on the flanks. There have been a couple of half-hearted attempts to storm the perimeter, but the Posleen appear to be stretched out in a long thin column that begins at that massive cluster on the map." The finger tapped the map twice. "They can't really bring any mass to bear. The road's not bad, at least until you get to the Gap, where it disappears, so we've been able to keep a steady supply of mines and shells coming to them. The Fifth's holding. I said they would."
"Eventually, you know," Page retorted, "the Posleen will find the flanks."
"Yessir. That's why the SF teams are out on the flanks, to give the regiment warning of when it's time to pull back. The Seven-Sixtieth Engineer company is building them fall-back positions all the way to where the highway breaks out into the open east of the City."
Battle Position Ovalo, Darien Province, Republic of Panama
"Oh, I was drunk the day my mom got out of prison . . ."
Every unit needs a song. For the 760th, that was it. They were an unusual group, very tight, very cohesive and, in large part related by blood. They came from Marion, Virginia, in the United States. They'd brought their music with them. The crew of a bulldozer sang it even over the incessant roar of their piece of equipment.
Carter shook his head. He wasn't a country boy himself, but he'd grown up in the Army surrounded by them. That this unit had chosen that song? Well, it was no surprise.
"How close to complete, are you, Sam?" Carter asked of the 760th commander, a West Pointer long out of the Regular Army and transferred to the Reserves.
Sam spit out some tobacco juice—he'd picked up some appalling habits since assuming command of the company—and answered, "'Bout seventy percent here, sir. But we've already got a good start of prepping the next position back."
"Good work, Captain Cheatham. Pass on to your men my congratulations."
"Will do, Colonel."
Carter turned away to remount his Hummer to go east, back to the mass of his regiment. Even over the diesel's sound he heard, "She got run over by a dang ol' train . . ."
Shaking his head, Carter headed back down the highway cut through the jungle, back to the first battle position where he intended to bleed the yellow aliens white.
Darien Province, Republic of Panama
It should have teemed with life, that little village. After long weeks' absence Ruiz expected to be met at the outskirts by swarming children. His wives, old now but—since he was a soldier—soon to be rejuvenated to youth and health, ought to have been raising joyous cries at his return.
But . . . there was nothing: no children, no wives, no . . . people. All was silent as death. The Indian chief stepped out of his canoe to emptiness.
Ruiz enter the village stealthily. There wasn't much physical damage. Then again, there hadn't been much physical to the village to destroy. Some of the Chocoes' rude huts were knocked over, but a strong wind might have done that. The fire circles were still in place but the hearths internal to each hut were mostly broken. Ruiz placed a hand over one of them near the edge of the village. It was cold: At least three days since fire burned here, he thought.
Drawing an arrow from his quiver and feeding it to his prized bow, Ruiz began stalking stealthily from hut to tree t
o tree to hut along the outskirts of the tiny grass and wood town. At each hut that was still standing he paused to look inside. Still, nothing.
From the exterior he worked his way inward, still circling, still looking for life or some other sign to tell what had befallen his home town. Near the center he found his first clue, a perfectly sliced rifle of the type the gringos had attempted, and failed, to teach him to shoot. The pieces of the rifle lay beside a scattering of expended brass cases. Of the soldier, or Chocoes scout (for a few had been able to learn to shoot), who had fired the rifle and left those cases there was no obvious physical sign.
Ruiz bent low to sniff the ground. Blood . . . even with the rains having washed most of it away over the last few days something or, more likely, someone was butchered here.
