The Hunters of Vermin

by H. Paul Honsinger

  There was no way he could let himself sleep. If he had been able to do his own packing for this venture, he would have brought along any number of scanners, electronic barriers, and approach surveillance systems that would have been able to detect any impending attack and awakened him to meet the threat, weapon in hand. But, the Vaaach didn’t pack any of that stuff for him.

  But, they did include the full field medkit, including the pharmapack with its generous supply of stims. He had enough of those to allow him to make it for three or four days without sleep, although he would feel like shit. Actually, worse than ordinary shit. More like the shit that comes out of you after eating borderline spoiled food. “Horrible” doesn’t even come close.

  On the other hand, “horrible” beats the shit out of “dead.”

  Max gathered a good supply of firewood and built his fire, in time to have a moderate-sized campfire casting a wide circle of light just as the forest became fully dark. He was feeling pretty pleased with himself in view of his campsite selection and fire-building skills until he took a more careful look at the size of his tiny island of light in a sea of forest darkness and made a few time/motion calculations.

  Sonofabitch.

  While some objects were dimly visible beyond, Max could classify only a ten meter or so radius around the fire as being truly illuminated. He might be able to see some threats at greater distance, but well-camouflaged ones, such as the erstwhile greenpig, would probably not be visible unless inside the ten meter ring. A fast animal at a run could cross that distance in well under two seconds, which wasn’t enough time for Max to see the threat, recognize it as such, stand, and draw his weapon. He needed an extra two seconds, at least. Even if he were standing, without an extra second’s warning, he’d probably not be prepared in time to defend himself.

  Where’s a wood-craft savvy forest ranger when you need him? Or . . . maybe I’m thinking of the wrong kind of ranger.

  While Max didn’t know much in the way of forest craft, he had enjoyed considerable exposure to someone who--at least fictitiously--did: the legendary Ranger Handlebar Simms. When he got a chance to catch up on TridVid programs, he liked to watch The Adventures of Handlebar Simms, Frontier Ranger. For the past eleven years, in full LifeKolor and Dimensiovision, every Friday night at 20:00 Zulu Hours, Ranger Simms enforced the law and brought justice to the thinly settled worlds of the Union Frontier, often to a different planet every week. And, crafty old Handlebar had more woods survival tricks than there were babies in a Krag birthing crèche.

  Max surmised that most of those techniques were probably bullshit, but one seemed to make a lot of sense. So, just as he had seen Ranger Simms do on at least a dozen episodes, Max gathered as much dry, crackly brush, twigs, and dead vegetation as he could find and arranged it in a ring around his campsite, about a meter and a half deep and half a meter or so high, about five meters beyond the circle illuminated by the fire. That way, at least, he might have a few seconds’ extra warning if an attacker was creeping up on his perimeter.

  The added security wasn’t much, but Max was going to take what he could get. Having finished his improvised perimeter alarm, Max folded his sleeping bag into half and laid it on the ground to sit on. It wasn’t much softer than the ground but, again, Max would take whatever additional comfort he could get, no matter how small. Then, he made himself a hot supper from his rations, heating the entrée with the ration heater included in every meal pack. While the entrée was heating, Max dug into the vegetable course, asparagus with “dairy-fresh-flavored buttery sauce,” one of his favorites even though he was sure that the sauce had nothing to do with a dairy, was anything but fresh, and contained nothing even remotely resembling butter.

  In theory, Max was supposed to have put the asparagus into the ration heater with the entrée, but Max had always liked vegetables such as corn, green beans, and asparagus straight from the ration pack. He certainly didn’t wait until the entrée was done before he started eating his veggies.

  Fighting soldiers, marines, and spacers living on field rations had long debated the right way to go about eating the components that went into their food packs the way the theologians of the Roman and Eastern Orthodox faiths debated each other regarding spiritual validity of the filioque clause going into the Nicene Creed—only without slicing and dicing and burning and pillaging.

  While the nuances of the debates on this point were as subtle as a gloss on a gloss on a gloss on a tiny hint in the Talmud, the basic controversy was pretty straightforward. As Union ration “blocks” contained three or four separately packaged and sealed courses and some incidental items, all vacuum-packed together in a semi-rigid, plastic shell (the halves of which made pretty decent disposable dishes, mixing bowls, or places to put small machine parts when you were doing maintenance), there were two basic schools of thought about how to eat them. Many, but not most, spacers tried to eat them as one would eat a multi-course meal in a ship’s mess or at the family dinner table: by opening all the little packs, setting them out, and taking a bite or two from the entrée, then a bite from the vegetables, and so on.

  Max did not subscribe to this school of thought for what he considered to be a compelling and decidedly non-Talmudic reason. Simply put, one doesn’t eat field rations in a nice, clean dining room where all courses can be laid out on the table and served up on one’s plate. One eats field rations in the field, where from the moment of the first break in the first seal in the first package, the entrée or veggies or dessert are exposed to the environment, whatever it may be, along with everything that goes along with that environment: wind, rain, dust, toxic smoke, alien insects, blowing leaves, anti-personnel shrapnel, radioactive fallout, and whatever otherworldly beasties found themselves the most strongly attracted to the delectable aroma of your cherry apricot spread and melba toast, lime gelatin with fruit bits, or Bravo Mining Camp-styled green beans and corn.

  There was another consideration that strongly influenced Max’s ration consumption technique. In order to eat all the courses at once, you had to cut open the meal pack, set up the ration heater, insert whatever course or courses required heating, and then twiddle your thumbs through the heating process while the other courses were just sitting there in their respective plastic cups, mini-bowls, and other containers just waiting to be eaten.

  Waiting was never Max’s strong suit. It was barely a pair of worn out socks. So, he did what most military personnel have been doing since the introduction of the Navy Standard Field Ration’s distant ancestor, the MRE (Meal, Ready to Eat or, as many soldiers called them, quite unfairly given their general palatability, “Meals Rejected by the Enemy”) by the United States of America on Earth in the late 20th century: he ate the other courses while the entrée was heating.

  Max was not a patient man. Not one bit. Notwithstanding his rank he was, after all, a sixteen year old boy. But, he was more patient than some (mostly middies), who never even bothered with the ration heaters, eating everything cold right out of the bag while nodding to each other, tossing the heaters over their shoulders into the woods, and saying, “Ration heaters are for pussies.”

  Of course, this practice invariably resulted in some Mother Goose coming along and sending the sheepish mids into the woods to find the heaters so that their presence did not give the party away to the enemy or, more likely, cause a forest fire the next time the heaters got wet.

  Using his pack as a backrest, Max sat in moderate comfort, consuming every bite of his sliced peaches in heavy syrup, asparagus, and four saltine crackers while his “Asian style beef strips with hot and sour sauce and vegetables” was heating. Even so, Max didn’t allow the entrée to heat for the full prescribed four minutes, which would have made it too hot to be eaten quickly. Instead, he allowed only two and a half minutes of heating, which left the food just slightly more than lukewarm, a temperature that allowed him to polish it off in under five seconds.

  When he had licked the last of the hot and sour sauce from the ins
ide of its plastic container, Max used water from his canteen and a tiny tube of pale yellow crystals to make some “country style lemonade flavored beverage,” which went down the hatch along with the Nebula Nougat candy bar that accompanied the meal. Belching loudly and unapologetically, Max broke out the water boiler, a mini-stove designed to do one thing and one thing only--heat 600 milliliters (a quantity that some traditionalists still called “2 1/2 cups”) of water to be mixed with a freeze dried base to make coffee, tea, or soup. Assembly of the stove took about half a minute. It took Max another half a minute to find the box containing the stove’s fuel pellets, each just enough to boil 600 ml of water, with a generous margin to account for freezing cold water, wind, and other variables. Boiling the water took just under five minutes. Into the boiling water, Max dropped two “freeze dried genuine Colombian flavor dark roast coffee” pellets and two sweetener pellets. He then waited (not so) patiently for the two minutes specified in the package directions for the liquid in his cup to become something that roughly (very roughly) approximated coffee.

  The pellets came in light, medium, and dark roast; Max always requested the dark roast to be packed in his survival gear because, although it was a bit bitter for his taste, at least it had some flavor, unlike the light and medium roast that tasted like it was made from a mixture of water and food coloring that someone heated and ran through a filter while gazing at a photograph of the Andes mountains of Colombia on Earth (where, according to all the instructional databases, the best coffee was still grown). Once the two minutes had lapsed, Max poured some of the alleged coffee from the water boiler into the cup from his mess kit and slowly slipped the hot liquid, trying not to grimace at its less than smooth flavor. Every few minutes, he made a point of carefully scanning the perimeter of his camp with the Mark I eyeball and with the binocs. He saw nothing, nothing, and more nothing.

  He looked up at the sky, hoping to entertain himself by studying the stars in the sky of this strange, new world. But, there must have been a light overcast or haze in the air, because Max couldn’t manage to make them out. What would have been a source of entertainment that would have helped keep him alert was denied to him.

  It was going to be a long night.

  CHAPTER V

  15:34 HOURS ZULU (04:52 LOCAL SOLAR TIME), 21 JULY 2304

  SNAP! SNAP-CRUNCH!

  Max had been fighting sleep, notwithstanding the stims racing through his bloodstream, when he jerked to full, adrenalin-charged alertness at these distinctive sounds. He may not have been crafty old Handlebar Simms, but he knew the sound of something stepping on twigs when he heard it.

  Not something, but someone. There was something to the rhythm of the crunches and the total silence that followed that told Max that there was a sentient mind rather than a mere animal brain directing the feet that made those sounds.

  Max broke into a cold sweat and felt his stomach lurch violently as the feeling of being stalked threatened to reawaken the old terror: being hunted by the Krag in the interstices of the USS San Jacinto after its capture and before it was retaken by Union forces twenty-six days later. Forcing the seemingly endless horror of those twenty-six days to the back of his mind, Max turned to face the sound and, seeing nothing, scanned the area with his binocs with the same result. He damned the Vaaach for not providing him with an electric hand torch. With the standard issue torch that would ordinarily have been in his pack, Max could have lit up anything lurking out in the darkness up to a kilometer away. As it was, his range of vision was much, much less.

  His heart beating wildly and his stomach performing gymnastics routines worthy of the Pan Human Olympiad, Max came to his feet and drew his boarding cutlass. He took a few steps in the direction of the sound, focusing every sense that way to try to determine if there was a threat out there and, if so, what it was. Try as he might, Max had no sense of anything moving in front of him in the woods. Suddenly, the hairs on the back of his neck stood up and there was a sudden feeling of wrongness centered right between his shoulder blades.

  Idiot! You forgot to check your six!

  With a sick feeling of dismay in his gut, Max spun 180 degrees.

  To face four red eyes.

  They shone with a seemingly demonic light in the glow of Max’s campfire. The four eyes were attached to two Krag scout marines in full battle gear, submachine guns slung, and swords drawn, creeping up on him from behind. The Krag apparently planned to deal with Max using edged weapons rather than rifles, perhaps out of fear that Max had friends somewhere nearby in the woods who would be alerted by gunfire.

  They must have deployed some kind of mechanical decoy or sent one of their buddies to get me facing in one direction while they sneaked up on me from the other.

  Max barely had time to wonder why Krag were there notwithstanding that the Vaaach had told him otherwise before the brace of Krag warriors leaped three meters through the air and landed just beyond Max’s arms reach.

  I’ll never get used to that fucking damn leaping thing they do.

  While the Krag were sizing Max up and trying to figure out the best way to attack him, Max--as he did whenever possible--struck first. He made a quick feint toward each of the two Krag. Judging the one on the left to be the mentally weaker of the two because it had flinched the hardest and pulled back the farthest, Max charged it, shrieking his best imitation of fighting cat sounds at the top of his lungs. Some old chief had told him that the sounds triggered an instinctual fear reaction in Krag that gave an advantage in a fight. Max saw no effect, but he kept doing it anyway.

  Rather than raising his cutlass over his head in the classic manner of skirmishers since the dawn of warfare, Max emulated the ancient Romans by keeping his blade low in a stabbing position pointed right at the Krag’s center body mass. The Krag, on the other hand, held his blade out to his right like a cavalry sabre to slash at Max’s unprotected left side. Continuing to charge the Krag, Max suddenly lunged left toward the enemy’s sword arm, putting him inside the Krag’s stroke, and slamming into the Krag’s forearm. The Krag having missed, Max stabbed at its arm, only to miss as the Krag performed a quick drop and roll to put human and Krag once again at sword-fighting distance from one another.

  Max knew that subtle swordplay was not his strength. So, when the Krag had gotten his feet under him but before he had managed to get into a stable fighting stance, Max used his left hand to cross-draw the trusty dirk he had carried since his first week as a midshipman and hurled himself directly at the enemy’s torso, knocking his rat-like enemy to the ground in a move not unlike a lineman throwing a block in the old-fashioned but still played game of American football. Being no model of grace and agility, either, Max could not help but fall on top of the rodent while plunging the dirk into the Krag’s heart. It expired instantly, its final breath a gurgling rattle

  Now, where’s the other one?

  Not having the second enemy in sight, Max’s first move was an instinctual one drawn from space combat--a sudden movement in an unexpected direction to throw off any firing solution the enemy might be developing for a weapons launch. In this case, Max rolled quickly to his left with the intention of leaping to his feet at the end of the roll.

  It didn’t work out that way.

  The roll and leap maneuver went awry as Max heard a loud crack associated with an intense burning pain penetrating his right bicep causing him to drop his boarding cutlass and fall to the ground again just as he was starting to get up.

  That fucking Krag just shot me.

  Heedless of the bright red blood he was rapidly losing from his brachial artery, Max picked up the sword with his left hand and charged the Krag in an attempt to knock it out of shooting position before it could get off a second shot.

  This play, too, did not develop as expected. Instead, the Krag’s shot was thrown off by Max falling away from its point of aim as he collapsed from blood loss. Knowing that he was seconds from blacking out for good, Max desperately tried to regain his footing, but fel
l to the ground again almost immediately. Now, he was too weak even to crawl. He groped for his fighting knife and tried to throw it at the Krag, only to have it drop to the forest floor after traveling less than half a meter. He managed to get his hand on his dirk and held it tightly so he could use it if the Krag got within arm’s reach.

  Even across the gulf between the species, Max could plainly see the Krag’s conspicuous victor’s swagger as it approached to deliver the coup de grace. The beady-eyed alien checked his weapon to be sure a round was in the chamber and made certain that the fire selector ring at the top of the weapon’s grip was turned to the SEMI AUTOMATIC position, making the point that it wasn’t going to waste ammunition. A single bullet would be enough for the hapless human. If a Krag could smirk, this one would be smirking.

  Just as the Krag was taking aim, an enormous bear-like form dropped almost noiselessly out of the trees directly between it and Max. With an indolent swipe of its huge, hairy arm, the newcomer sent the Krag flying almost ten meters through the air while somehow stripping it of its weapon. As the Krag arced across the clearing in a ballistic trajectory, Max’s apparent rescuer used the enormous muscles in its legs--legs that Max estimated to each have the same diameter as a largish manhole cover--to launch itself through the air in a great bound that landed it at the Krag’s side within a half second of the rodent’s striking the ground. The creature then, in the manner of a mean-spirited brother bent on doing harm to one of his sister’s dolls, used one hand to pick up the Krag by the legs and swing it with a chopping motion into the side of a large tree, each time breaking bones with a shudder-inducing crackle that Max easily heard from halfway across the clearing.