by Ben Bova
She grinned at him. “No matter. If we’re not ready to attack them by dawn, it will be because we’re dead.”
CHAPTER 38
Whether or not my plan would have worked, we never found out. The brutes attacked us before we had a chance to try it.
Adena picked two troopers to go with us: Ogun, the burly armorer who looked at the world from behind a scowl, and Lissa, a tall, lithe, dark-haired beauty whose specialty was explosives.
“If we catch the brutes asleep in their camp,” Adena explained to me, “Lissa can rig her grenades to destroy them with a single blow.”
The lowering sun had dipped behind the cliff in which our cave was set, throwing the blackened and littered field in front of us into deepening shadow. Adena ordered the four of us to sleep, since we would be on the move once true night covered the area.
I have never needed much sleep, but I commanded my body to relax as I stretched out on one of the floating cots. I closed my eyes and within minutes I was drowsing.
If I dreamed, I do not remember. But I was awakened by a strange, cloying odor that tingled in my nostrils and made me feel as if I were choking. I opened my eyes and tried to sit up. The cot tilted beneath me and I slid to the stony floor with a thump.
Adena lay asleep on the cot beside mine, her arms and legs limp, her face turned in my direction, utterly relaxed. I started to gag on the strange odor; it was like having your face pushed into a thicket of exotic tropical flowers.
I staggered to my feet, only to see that all the other troopers were asleep, too. No one was on guard. Gas! I realized. Somehow they were filling the cave with a gas that had knocked everyone unconscious. The only sound in the cave was the soft hum of the power packs, which kept the lights on.
Lurching, gagging, I battled my way past the fallen bodies of the troopers and out into the fresh air beyond the cave’s entrance. It was black night, clear and frigid, the stars shimmering coldly in the icy air. I filled my lungs once, twice, as my head cleared.
They must be about to attack us, I thought.
Unless the gas is lethal.
I plunged back into the cave, holding my breath as I dashed to my cot and the helmet that rested beneath it. I pulled the helmet on, slid down its visor, and pressed the stud at my waist that activated the suit’s life-support system. A tiny fan whirred to life, and I felt clear air blowing against my face. I breathed again. Quickly, with one eye on the cave entrance, I pulled Adena’s helmet over her head and put her on suit air. Then I went to the cave entrance to be on guard there.
“What happened?” I heard Adena’s voice in my earphones, wobbly, confused.
Looking back into the cave toward her, I began to explain. But out of the shadows deeper in the cave I saw one of the brutes looming, a long, pointed shaft of crystal aimed at Adena’s back.
“Look out!” I shouted as I grabbed for the pistol bolstered at my side. Adena ducked instinctively as the brute rushed toward her. I fired and hit him in the face. He howled and went down, the crystal spear shattering as it hit the cave floor.
There was no time for more explanations. More of the enemy were rushing at us from out of the darkness at the rear of the cave. Adena picked up a rifle and cut them down. I covered her with my pistol. The two of us stood them off for what seemed like hours, but actually was no more than a few minutes. Suddenly their attack melted away into the shadows. Four of the hulking brutes lay dead at our feet.
“They’ve found a way to get into the cave from the rear,” I said, forcing my breath and heartbeat back to normal.
“Or made one,” Adena replied. “We don’t have much time. They’ll be back.”
I felt trapped. And outsmarted. The brutes had us surrounded now; our cave was no longer a shelter — it was a confining, constricting cell of solid stone in which we were unable to move, unable to escape. The walls seemed to be closing in on me. My hands started to shake.
But it was not fear that racked me. It was anger. As I looked around at the bare stone walls of the cave, realizing that it could well become a coffin for all of us, I was seized with fury. At myself. How could I be so stupid? The chamber deep beneath the ground that Ahriman had created in the twentieth century, the dark stone womb of a temple he had built at Karakorum, the caves he had dwelled in back in the Neolithic — caves and darkness were his places, his sources of power. Why didn’t I see it before? Why did I let these poor doomed soldiers stay in this trap? I should have known better.
As I berated myself, I worked with Adena to revive the others. Swiftly she told them what had happened.
“They thought they would find us all unconscious, and easy to kill. Now they know differently. They’ll be attacking from the front and rear, any minute now.”
The sensors up at the entrance to the cave showed plainly that more animals were moving about in the darkness of the night. Adena kept the cannon pointed outward toward the open field of snow and ice.
“Orion,” she commanded, “you, Ogun and Lissa must cover the rear of the cave. Try to find where the enemy is coming from. It looks as if they can’t bring a large number of fighters through that way at the same time. If the three of you can’t hold them, call for help.”
I could not see Ogun’s face behind his visor, but I easily imagined the sour grimace on it. Lissa hauled a crate of grenades with her, towing it on a leash wound around her fist as it floated on its anti-gravity disc a few inches above the ground.
“I can give you explosive forces from mild concussion to the kiloton range,” she said, her voice sounding almost cheerful in my helmet earphones.
“It looks too confined in here for explosives,” I said as we pushed deeper into the cave’s narrowing recess.
“Yes, I’m afraid you’re right,” she answered glumly.
Leaving the bodies of the slain brutes behind us, we inspected the narrowing rock tunnel by the lights set into our helmets. It soon became too tight for the three of us to walk abreast. Ogun took the lead; I followed, with Lissa a few steps behind me.
“We checked out this area when we first came to this cave,” Ogun grumbled. “There’s no way out of…”
“What is it?”
He had stopped dead in his tracks. I looked past his shoulder and saw an opening in the cave floor in front of him.
“That wasn’t there yesterday,” Ogun muttered. He knelt on the rocky ground and picked up a few loose pebbles in his gloved hand. “This is new. They must have been digging all the time we were being attacked.”
“Why aren’t they guarding this shaft?” Lissa wondered. “Have they just abandoned it?”
I peered down into it. The light from our helmets was swallowed up in a well that seemed bottomless.
“They’ll be back,” Ogun said. “When they’re ready to attack again, they’ll come swarming up here.”
But something about the shaft bothered me. Lissa was right: if this was their avenue to attack us from the rear, why had they abandoned it?
“Let’s move back,” I said.
“Back?” Ogun’s voice sounded puzzled. “Why?”
“I can booby-trap the shaft,” Lissa suggested. “If they try to use it again they’ll blow themselves to pieces.” I couldn’t get over how happy she sounded when she talked about blasting people to death.
“It’s a fake,” I said, just as surprised as they were to hear the words coming out of my mouth. “A feint. Maybe they used this shaft earlier, but they’re probably digging a new one right now, between here and the main chamber of the cave.”
“They’ll cut us off,” Ogun said.
“And surprise the rest of the troop from the rear,” Lissa added.
I nodded, then realized they could not see it through my helmet visor. “Come on, quickly!” I said.
We scrambled back as quickly as we could toward the spot where the bodies of the dead brutes lay. Once there, with the lights and activity of the other troopers at our backs, I took off my helmet and pressed my ear to the rock wall. Sur
e enough, I could hear a crunching, tapping sound. Someone, somewhere, was digging.
Adena must have seen us, for she appeared at my side and asked why we were not back in the deeper recess of the cave, as she had ordered us to be. I explained: “They’re digging another entrance into the cave. They’ll attack as soon as they break through.”
She looked skeptical until I invited her to listen to them at work. Then she nodded her understanding.
“We’ll be ready for them,” she said grimly.
Waiting was the most difficult part of it. The sensors at the cave’s mouth showed the enemy’s buildup of beasts quite clearly, despite the blackness of the night. Marek attached seismic sensors to the cave walls back where we were, and their flashing lights showed every blow the brutes were striking against the rock. As they came closer to the cave, the sensors began to triangulate their location. Soon we knew where they would break through. But we had no way of knowing when.
We kept our helmets on, visors down, gripped our weapons and waited.
Nerves stretched taut. Fingers tapped on gunstocks or fiddled with equipment. I strained my eyes at the blank rock wall, trying to see through it to the enemy working so patiently, so laboriously to reach us. How they must hate us, I thought. How they must be focusing every ounce of their strength and hatred against us, sixteen men and women, alone, abandoned, trapped in a time and a place far from their own, waiting for a battle that can end only in extermination of one side or the other.
The sensor lights went blank. They’ve stopped digging, I thought. Why?
“Here they come!” came a shout from the cave’s mouth. I inadvertently turned to glance in that direction…
The wall of the cave in front of me exploded, knocking all of us back onto the ground. I rolled over, my rifle still in my hands, and saw a half-dozen of the brutes charging at us out of the smoke and rubble. They were big, powerful, their broad, red-eyed faces snarling with fury and crystal spears in their raised hands.
I fired pointblank at them. The rifle’s beam cut the first two in half, but their momentum carried them into me and they fell beside me as I rose to one knee and fired again. Ogun was firing too, but one of the brutes reached him with a crystal spear. It barely grazed his helmet, but a shower of sparks erupted and I heard Ogun scream in my earphones. His body spasmed, arched, then fell dead.
I ducked under the spear that was aimed at me and jammed the muzzle of my rifle into the brute’s midsection as I pulled the trigger. His body burst into flame, and he shrieked hideously as he bounced away from me and into the others behind him.
Lissa had recovered her wits now and was firing into the brutes who were emerging from their newly dug tunnel. I lost count of how many there were; we fired and dodged and fired again at them, killing them left and right until their bodies jammed the entryway that they had blasted out of the rock.
Lissa leaped onto the barricade of flesh and lobbed a grenade into the tunnel. Its explosion shook the whole cave — stones fell from the ceiling; smoke filled the area.
I staggered back a few steps, turned and glanced at the front of the cave. A huge gray-brown bear was rearing on its hind legs, roaring and swinging its clawed paws at the troopers ringed around it like midgets. A dozen rifles blasts hit it, but the bear stalked forward, into the cave, as the soldiers fell back. Behind it I could see wolves and stinking great cats with saber fangs.
The cannon fired its searing beam of raw red energy into the bear’s chest, blasting the beast in two, blood and bone and flesh splattering in every direction. As it toppled to the cave floor, already slippery with blood, the soldiers turned their weapons on the wolves and saber-toothed cats.
I looked back at the tunnel mouth we were guarding. Lissa was busily rigging explosive charges, sitting on the floor, her back to the barricade of dead bodies, her rifle on the ground beside her.
I went to her and peered into the murky darkness of the tunnel.
“There don’t seem to be any more of them coming from this direction,” I said.
I could sense her nodding inside her helmet. “This will seal off the tunnel.” She lifted with both hands a set of grenades that she had wired together. “Then we can seal off the other one, farther back.”
I agreed to her plan. Quickly she dropped her explosive package into the tunnel. We flattened out against the solid rock wall as she counted off five seconds. The blast jarred me almost to my knees, but when the smoke cleared, Lissa shone her helmet light into the tunnel and laughed lightheartedly.
“It’ll take them awhile to dig through that,” she said triumphantly.
Within minutes she had blasted the other tunnel shut, and we joined the others at the front of the cave.
Wave after wave of animals attacked us, and we battled them back. Huge, ferocious bears, snarling wolves and smaller dogs, saber-toothed mountain lions. We killed them by the dozens, by the score, by the hundreds. The nighttime darkness was lit by the glow of our energy weapons; the stars themselves faded from the sky in the blood-red light of our killing beams. Through the padding of my helmet and earphones I could hear the screaming, howling, shrieking roars of pain and fury as the animals were driven at us by Ahriman’s diabolical powers, only to be slaughtered by the blazing energies of our guns.
Off in the distance, barely seen against the flickering shadows, I could now and then glimpse one of the brutes, skulking among the poor savage beasts that they were commanding. But they never came close enough to kill; they stayed their distance, as if they knew that what had happened to their comrades at the tunnel would happen to them.
I heard a voice in my head calling to them, daring them, challenging them: Come and fight us yourselves! Leave these poor dumb beasts alone and take up the fight, face to face. Come and meet the death you hand out so freely to others.
But they hung back, keeping to the shadows.
After long hours of fighting, I realized that the cannon had gone silent. The lights in the cave were out; we fought by the light of our weapons and the lamps built into our helmets now. My own rifle finally quit on me, and I began to use my pistol, instead.
As dawn tinted the sky with a grayish pink, the attacks stopped. The ground in front of the cave, once smooth with pristine snow, was a blackened, bloodied shambles of dead beasts, shattered limbs, bodies ripped open, flesh torn apart.
I looked around me. Four soldiers were down, their helmets and armor broken, blood-soaked. Counting Ogun, back by the tunnel, we had lost five. There were only eleven of us left alive, and three of them were wounded, including Kedar. His leg had been broken when a bear charged into the cave and made it almost to the power packs.
Lissa and several others began tending to the wounded. I went to Adena, who was surveying the battlefield with a powerful pair of electronically boosted binoculars.
“They’re leaving,” she said, as if she knew I was beside her. “The brutes are moving off to the south.”
“We’ve won,” I said.
She handed the binoculars to me. “Not until we’ve killed the last one of them.”
I looked out toward the south. Through the magnification of the binoculars I saw eight people like Ahriman shambling through the snow. There was no sign of any animals with them. No tracks except their own. Not even a dog accompanied them.
“They’ve thrown everything they have at us,” I said, “and we beat them off. They’ve lost.”
Adena’s visor was up, and I could see that her face was set in grim determination. “No, Orion. We may have won this battle, but the war is not finished. Our task is to exterminate them.”
“Those eight…”
She nodded. “Those last eight brutes must be killed, Orion. We have to go out after them.”
“Is that Ormazd’s command?” I asked her.
The corners of her mouth curved slightly in the beginning of a smile. “It is my command, Orion. It is what must be done.”
CHAPTER 39
She gave orders quickly, effi
ciently. Kedar and the other wounded would remain in the cave. The rest of us started out after the fleeing enemy, without pausing for rest. We gulped down food capsules as we slogged through the knee-deep snow, following the trail left by the brutes, under a clean blue morning sky. The air was cold but still, as chilled and delicious as wine.
“Eight of us against eight of them,” I said as I marched beside Adena. “Ormazd arranges things neatly.”
She gazed at me, her gray eyes gleaming in the reflection of the morning sun against the pure white snow.
“You mustn’t think that Ormazd is doing all this for his entertainment, Orion,” she said. “We are dealing with the fate of the universe here, the maintenance of the continuum.”
“By hunting down a handful of people…”
“ Ahriman’speople,” she corrected. “Our enemies.”
“Whose most powerful weapon is some sort of electrostatic wand, while we have laser guns that can cut them down at a thousand yards.”
“Do you think it would be fairer if we fought them hand-to-hand?” She almost seemed amused. “The power packs that heat our suits and energize our weapons will be drained soon enough. The main power packs back in the cave are completely drained. We’ll be fighting them hand-to-hand soon enough, Orion. Will that please you?”
I had to admit that it did not.
“They must be exterminated,” Adena went on, her face utterly serious now. “Every last one of them, including Ahriman. Especially Ahriman. You understand that, don’t you?”
With a reluctant nod, I replied, “I understand that Ormazd wants it so. I understand that Ahriman wants to exterminate us. But I don’t like it.”
She gave me a strange, almost pitying glance. “Orion… we are not here to enjoy what we do. We do what must be done. We have no choice.”
I started to reply, but thought better of it and held my tongue.
We pushed on through deepening snow, walking in the tracks made by the enemy band. The sun shone brightly but without much heat out of a cloudless sky of perfect blue. Adena headed our little column; I walked beside her. Due south the tracks headed, through a featureless expanse of dazzling white snow. After long hours of marching, with nothing to do except plant one foot in front of the other and watch my breath puffing out in tiny clouds of steam, I saw a forest of huge pine trees rising on the horizon, their deep green a startling, welcome contrast to this world of white.
