by Michael Ryan
“At least we have the element of surprise,” Mallsin said.
“All right, then. It’s settled,” I said.
We spent the next four hours hashing out the details of an approach that stood any chance at all of working. Pow relayed our discussion to the chief, and then we held a two-hour war council with the tribal leaders. After a heated debate and a lot of yelling, we eventually arrived at a meeting of the minds.
Our march to the Ted’s encampment was scheduled to begin the next day. Veenz took me aside after the council and spoke to me in a low voice.
“A lot of us are going to die,” he said. “But then again, we’ve made it through worse.”
“It’s been a good run, sir.”
“Indeed it has, Avery. Better than the one the poor bastards we dropped with who’ve been worm food all this time got. On balance, hard to complain.” The lieutenant offered a grim smile that was more akin to a grimace and walked toward his hut, his bearing erect and his shoulders straight, still for all circumstances a warrior.
There are several ways to attack a force that has superior weapons and technology. One is guerrilla warfare, coupled with weapons of mass destruction, if possible. The second is to throw an overwhelming number of soldiers at the enemy. A third is to use their technology against them – like by cracking their computer codes and programming their systems to malfunction or turn against them.
If you can do all three, even a mighty adversary can falter or fall.
We didn’t have the time to run an effective guerrilla campaign. The Teds would call for reinforcements the moment it became obvious they were losing, and they’d report our attack immediately regardless. Even if they were one hundred percent convinced they’d defeat us, our presence would be reported to their chain of command. We had them outnumbered by as many as fifty to one, but a well-placed CFM gunner with even a moderate amount of ammo could kill thousands of unarmored assailants.
The only things we had in our favor were the element of surprise and an experienced computer hacker.
Which left us with stealth, luck, and Callie’s programming skills.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
There are no justifications required with victory on the battlefield; with defeat, you will not be around to offer excuses.
~ General Slobrent Vollerbrant
When the tribe went to war, it marched.
The men brought a dozen juvenile animals in cages to the stone fire ring that served as the tribe’s central gathering place. The furry mammals, which looked a bit like lambs, had been muzzled to silence them. I asked Pow what the tribe hoped to accomplish with the harmless creatures. “Watch,” he said, his expression unreadable.
When our war party was clear of the tribal grounds, a native killed one of the animals and carried it to the rear of our column, leaving a trail of blood behind us.
“This explains nothing, Pow,” I said. I asked whether it was an offering to some war god, but he rolled his eyes and shook his head.
“They call the sharbeel,” he said. “The creature you call the catrilla.”
“Well, that explains everything,” I said. I don’t think Pow appreciated my sarcasm.
Some customs weren’t worth fighting over, but we had taken a hard stand on the question of whether or not our women were going to join us. It took a lot of explaining and arguing to convince the leaders that the female Gurts would be part of the raid. Pow insisted that it was part of our culture, and that to forbid them from doing so would be a great dishonor to us. If they expected the Raiders to fight, they’d have to accept us as a mixed-gender unit.
Pow wasn’t a trained warrior, but he was male and thus expected to fight. “They want me to join you,” he’d explained.
“I’ll keep you in the rear,” I said. “Out of as much danger as I can.”
His brows knit. “You question my loyalty?”
“No,” I said. “It’s just if the Teds identify you…”
“I understand,” he said, and then glanced around as though ready to share a disturbing secret. He leaned into me, his voice so low I could barely hear him. “I want to stay here and live with Genba. I think she’s pregnant.”
“Congratulations,” I said. “If we’re all eliminated before you…do what you think is right.”
“Thank you.”
We marched out of camp with nearly five hundred warriors armed with spears, knives, and clubs. Our longbow platoon numbered two hundred, each with about thirty arrows.
I missed my armor. The tribesmen who were the equivalent of infantry had large wooden shields covered with thick moose leather, painted with a tribal symbol that looked like two big yellow eyes.
Callie was by my side, watching the fighters join their groups as the leaders disappeared down a trail. “Some of them are just kids,” she said.
“Men with full tribal rights,” I said.
“Don’t give me the culturally superior stuff.”
“They wanted you to stay back with the toddlers,” I pointed out.
“Touché,” she said. “It just seems…I guess you’re right. Who am I to judge their customs?”
Abrel approached us. “You think they’ll maintain any form of discipline?”
“Of course not,” I said. “I expect this to be a major cluster-fuck with a lot of unnecessary bloodshed.”
“You could try to be optimistic,” Mallsin said from behind us.
“You shouldn’t eavesdrop,” I said. I laughed at the sight of the makeshift armor that fell awkwardly over her breasts. “You and Callie could sneak into their camp, seduce their top officers, and then slit their throats afterward while they sleep.”
“Not funny,” Callie said.
“Sexual harassment,” Mallsin teased. “Abrel, would you hit him for me?”
“Good a plan as any I’ve heard,” Abrel said.
“You can’t be serious.”
“I’m not suggesting you screw their officers,” he said. “I’m saying we could consider using you two as bait.”
“You mean we could lie around the swamp in the nude and wait for some dumb Ted to ask us if we want a drink?”
“Well…”
“He might be onto something,” I said.
Callie frowned.
“No, look. The Ted combat teams don’t bring women.”
“You know this because…?” Callie asked.
“I’ve studied it.”
“Then what are you saying?”
“I’m saying we have a chance to use a diversion that might save lives.”
“Okay. If it saves lives…”
“Don’t be sarcastic.” The portion of my mind that formulates plans was otherwise occupied, so I walked ahead of my friends. I needed more time to think.
We didn’t have telescopes.
“Pow, try to explain to the chief that they can see us even though we’re really far away,” I said.
It was daybreak, and we’d spotted our first Ted on guard duty. He was obviously bored. He had field binoculars but was using them infrequently. Pow was able to get across to the chief the idea that when the soldier put the black instrument to his face, he had the vision of a catrilla. The tribal leaders in the forward position with us understood. They stood perfectly still in the brush when the enemy guard looked in our direction.
“Should we take him out?” Abrel asked.
“I think we should try for more intel,” I said, and looked to Veenz. “Lieutenant?”
Veenz nodded an affirmative.
“Pow, can you explain to the natives they need to give us time to recon?”
“Recon?” he asked. “I don’t know this word.”
“We have to sneak around their camp. We want to see exactly how many enemies there are and how they’ve positioned their defenses.”
“I’ll try,” he said.
They argued for five minutes. When he returned to us, his expression was glum. “He said you can have until just after sundown. When the night sky is darkes
t, he wants to begin the attack.”
“Fair enough,” I said to Pow. I turned to Abrel. “That gives us maybe twelve hours.”
“It’s hard to coordinate a battle without a clock.”
“It’s hard to coordinate a battle without grenades and missiles.”
I did my best to guess the terrain around us. There were small groves of trees surrounded by swamp, intermixed with large patches of high grass and shrubs. No matter what routes we chose, we couldn’t avoid being exposed part of the way. If just one member of our group was detected, the Teds would be on alert, and any thoughts of subtly or surprise would be gone.
I resigned myself to accept that most of what was coming was going to be out of my control. Callie and I accompanied a small group of natives to the south, and Abrel and Mallsin led a group to the north. Lieutenant Veenz stayed with the chief in the hopes that he could ensure the tribal leader didn’t do anything rash.
Our patrol passed two Ted guards before we had a view of the encampment. They’d set up three sets of large field tents with adjacent smaller officer quarters, giving me an estimate of thirty-six combat engineers and a handful of officers, with perhaps three additional admin staff. So forty-five to fifty men.
Normally, I’d be zooming with my suit’s cameras and taking pictures of the enemy’s defenses. Not having any modern tech, I tried my best to memorize the location of their big guns. They had only two CFM guns set in fortified holes, each with a pair of operators for crew.
“That pair of CFMs could hold off a couple of thousand of us,” I said to Callie. The three tribesmen with us couldn’t understand me, but they could see I was frustrated. One of them mimed with hand signals that we should go back to the chief. I concurred.
As I was turning to go, Callie tapped my arm and indicated a depression in the landscape. “You see that swale?”
I squinted at the area, trying to make it out. “Not really,” I admitted.
“Follow my finger.” She pointed to a slight dip in the terrain.
“Okay,” I said.
“There’s a solid hundred meters that looks like it’s below the guns’ lines of sight,” she stated. “That’s our line of entry.”
“It doesn’t seem low enough,” I said.
“Not if you’re standing. But crab-crawling…”
“That’s a long way to go on all fours.”
“Nobody said being a space marine was easy.”
“Touché.”
“Pow,” I said, “is there any possible way to describe to him what’s going to happen when those guns start firing on his men?”
“I’ve tried,” he answered. “No matter how many times I try to explain it, I don’t think he gets the idea of something more destructive than an arrow.”
“Look,” I said. “I’m not afraid to fight, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to run into a CFM and get cut in half by a few hundred Gauss flechettes to prove my loyalty. That would be like signing up to stand beneath an avalanche because the chief can’t get his head around gravity.”
“I think our only option is to sneak in later tonight,” Abrel said.
“They’ve got heat and motion sensors,” I said.
“Yes, but maybe we’ll catch them understaffed. And at night, most of their people will be sleeping–”
“Once those sensors trip, the gunners start shooting. They’ve got night vision, and we’ve got nothing but war paint and moose skin. The second they begin firing on us, the rest of the platoon will be called into action. It’ll take them two minutes, maybe less. Anything that moves out here within half a click of their entrenchments will get shredded to pieces.”
“So…” Abrel shook his head. “I’m not exactly ready to die for nothing, either.”
“Maybe we try subterfuge?” Callie asked.
“You mean go back to the seduction plan?” Mallsin asked. “Like we go in there shaking our asses?”
“With more subtlety,” Callie answered.
“No,” Abrel said.
“I agree,” the lieutenant added. “We send you women in and it’s likely they’ll kill you or, at the very least, take you as prisoners.”
“If we’re going for a straightforward attack, then, we need to move in along the swale,” Callie said, and tapped one of the wooden shields. “These should stop flechettes.”
I knocked my fist on my shield. Because their usual opponents relied on arrows and spears, the shields they used were hard as nails and fashioned in a scutum style. When the shield was held upright, a Tsalagian could shield his entire body from harm. The antipersonnel rounds the CFM gunners would be firing in this environment wouldn’t be armor-piercing, but instead the smaller and cheaper mini-flechettes. While worthless against a TCI-Armored soldier, they were devastatingly effective against an enemy that wasn’t fully armored.
Which was often the case with modern troops who didn’t carry medieval shields.
“Pow, explain to them our reasoning and our proposed line of attack, please,” I said.
He spent a few minutes talking to the native lieutenants and sergeants. “Okay, they understand,” he said. “But they want you to wait for the catrilla to show up.”
“Huh?”
“The pecoraz, um, the little things you called lambs?”
“Yes?”
“I thought I explained this to you. The catrilla has been following us.”
“Explain,” I said.
“The catrilla has been following the blood trail.”
“Yes, I understood that part. Why?”
“They have a relationship, the tribe and the sharbeel. Just wait and watch.”
“I don’t know if I can take any more surprises,” I said. “What’s going to keep that thing from eating us?”
“Check out your shield, Avery. From the perspective of a predator.”
Sure enough, when I stood back and looked at the shield, the two yellow eyes popped out like a giant animal was staring at me. “Okay, I understand.”
“So, Avery,” the lieutenant said, “how do we proceed?”
“We move to the swale, wait for the giant man-eating cat to show, and then attack.”
“Easy,” Mallsin said. “And then have a sensible breakfast with plenty of fiber. Nothing to it. Be over in no time, I’m sure.”
“Join the army, they said. See the universe, they said. Have adventures, they said.”
She rolled her eyes. “Never trust a recruiter.”
“You can say that again.”
Pow grabbed my arm and leaned toward me. “The sharbeel is here.”
We lined up behind a stretch of dense brush about thirty meters from the swale. The center of the Ted stronghold was no more than two hundred meters from our starting point and easily within the range of our archers.
The natives had amazing internal clocks. Somehow, without anything except perhaps the movement of the stars and a sliver of moon, they coordinated a flurry of simultaneous activity: three of the patrolling guards were neutralized with arrows to the throat, and a fourth was hit with a dead, bloody lamb.
The catrilla leapt with monstrous fury. When the lamb smacked him in the chest, the Ted soldier was stunned for a critical moment – as would be anyone under the circumstances, I reasoned. He didn’t have a chance to communicate with his unit before the catrilla tore his head off.
The catrilla’s attack drew the gunners’ attention, and they fired at the animal as it dragged the dead guard into the woods.
The beast screamed in pain as the flechettes punctured its skin, but at that range they only served to further aggravate it.
I’d been following the action and had missed the fact that almost all of the three hundred native fighters were well into the swale and crawling toward the enemy base.
“Wow, they’re fast,” I whispered to Abrel.
“Born killers,” he said.
The advancing tribesmen had their shields strapped to their backs and moved like hermit crabs. The second set of gunne
rs in the farthest entrenchment spotted movement and began firing at it. Dozens of Teds poured from their tents, only to be skewered by a shower of razor-sharp arrows.
What began as a slaughter for our side felt too good to be true.
It was, of course, too good to be true.
The Teds adjusted their tactics. Those running from their tents were able to time their sprints between arrow volleys. The CFM crews located sections of our advancing line where the topography was higher and began to score hits. And the additional troops came equipped with grenades.
Our shields worked well against mini-flechettes but weren’t effective against frag grenades. The dead increased as my Raiders and I made our way up the line, often having to crawl over corpses. The first gun crew shifted their fire to us but paid a hefty price as the catrilla, unmolested by the gunners, slaughtered another Ted.
I knew from experience that seeing a peer die in battle wasn’t unusual, but watching a monster rip one of your buddies to shreds was. The Teds couldn’t possibly know how many of the beasts were lurking in the woods, so even though it was only one, the fear it created was substantial. That caused the Ted commander to make his first real mistake, and he ordered the squad that was attacking us to move and defend their rear from the catrilla.
Our archers concentrated on the two guns after the tents had emptied.
Their harassing fire didn’t kill anyone after the gunners compensated for the overhead attack, but the constant rain of arrows kept them distracted. When our line broke into the open, the gunners were forced to concentrate on the fighters at the leading edge of the attack. I’m sure the combat engineers were shocked that they were being overrun by a group of Stone Age fighters, but that was exactly what was happening to them in spite of their superior firepower and technology.
