by David Drake
Minh yelped over the radio and a rifle went flying, but there was no body in the mini-avalanche which bounced down the cliff in response to the blasts.
“They killed the captain! They killed the captain!”
Rudisill fired at the Gerin. The angle was hopelessly bad, but his bullets sparked and splattered on the rocks across the pool. The Slime ducked back beneath the surface and Heatherton, on the cliffs above, churned the water again with a vertical burst.
Minh still had his MARS. He launched the heavy rocket into the pool while Heatherton and Moschelitz kept the Slime down with rifle fire.
Rocks and steam spewed even higher than before, because the water level had been dropped by the first warhead. The cliff was black where water darkened the dun stone.
More steam belched from the cave. Shadowed figures moved beyond the bars. Rudisill thought he heard shouts and crying.
“They killed the captain!”
Even in an armored suit, the Gerin couldn’t survive a direct MARS hit. Rudisill’s left hand stung. He looked down and noticed for the first time that his left little finger was missing. The automatic laser had …
“That must’ve got the…” Heatherton started to say. The Slime rose from the bubbling water of the pool and raked the clifftop again with explosive shells.
Heatherton screamed with frustration. He triggered a wild burst as he lurched back from the spray of grit and shell fragments. Rudisill fired also, nowhere near the target that ducked away, back under the water.
“I know where it’s going!” Rudisill cried. “The pool connects with the cave, so the Slime gets out of the water and clear of the shock wave!”
Moschelitz fired his rifle into the pool.
There was a thump! as Sanger launched his MARS, the only rocket left in the commando. Its backblast slapped Rudisill like a hot, soft pillow.
The warhead detonated with a yellow glare that filled the interior of the cave. The half-open gates blew out in a tumbling arc. They thudded to the ground between Sanger and the sectioned hostage who’d tried to escape him.
The pool burped a gout of steam. No question now about it and the cave connecting. . . .
The Gerin staggered from the mouth of the cave. It was amazing that the Slime survived even wearing armor, but it had lost its weapon in the blast.
Rudisill, Heatherton, and Moschelitz emptied their rifles into the creature. A few of the bullets spanged and ricocheted from its battlesuit, but only a few. The corpse wasn’t even twitching by the time Sanger snatched up his rifle again and reloaded.
Sanger fired off his whole magazine anyway.
The silence that followed was broken only by the ringing in Rudisill’s ears.
Rudisill stood up, loading a fresh magazine by reflex.
The spotting table was still attached to his helmet. He jerked the leads out, careless of whether he damaged them. He walked over to Sanger and Lermontov, a few steps and a lifetime away.
Nothing moved within the cave except whorls of smoke.
Sanger cradled the captain’s head in his lap. Lermontov’s helmet had fallen off. His pale blue eyes were open and sightless.
Rudisill knelt and put his arm around the shoulders of the living trooper.
“The bastards,” Sanger whispered. He was weeping.
“The bastards. I swear I’ll kill ‘em all!”
Rudisill figured he meant the Slime, but when he looked toward the smoldering cave he wasn’t sure.
Rudisill wasn’t sure that he cared which Sanger meant, either.
AFTER THEIR initial victories the Castleman’s fleet settled onto the defensive. Had they been dealing with a human opponent, their supposition would have been that they had inflicted a defeat sufficient to discourage further attacks. Instead, they had only managed to upgrade man from a local menace to a major threat. Where the original Gerin invasion force had been composed of fewer than two hundred ships, the Gerin retaliated with over fifteen hundred ships, including dreadnoughts and carriers. There was never any question of the result.
The Castleman’s fleet was crushed in the first encounter. Its remnants were rallied around a heavy cruiser commanded by Captain Chu Lee MacDonald. This officer led the survivors in a fighting retreat. At one point, MacDonald’s fifty survivors turned and destroyed over a dozen Gerin cruisers. The unfortunate effect of their success was to reinforce the paranoia of their attackers, convincing them that all humans represented an immediate threat to the survival of their race.
A second ambush by the Castleman’s ships destroyed, at some cost to them, a Gerin headquarters ship. The effect of this astonished everyone as the Gerin force suddenly lost cohesion, fighting individually and in threes. This bought Castleman’s World exactly three extra days. The running battle continued until they were fighting within the actual atmosphere of Castleman’s World itself. Of over two hundred original human ships, less than a dozen fought their way free after their planet suffered the same fate as New Athens.
Having destroyed Castleman’s World, the victorious fleet split into several groups to enable them to strike at a number of human worlds simultaneously. For many of these planets the first knowledge of the loss of the Castleman’s fleet was a Gerin bombardment. Others, warned of the danger, still refused to give up their sovereignty and make a joint response. Seeing the human forces in disarray, many of the nonhuman races chose to limit their support to carefully observing the continuing Gerin success. Unified as a race, the Gerin see division as a weakness and are quick to exploit it. For the next months, a dozen human worlds fought hopeless battles against overwhelming odds.
“AWWWK! Frag the lieutenant! Frag the lieutenant! Arawwk!” The bird’s noise pierced the steamy midday air.
In the tense silence that followed, Charlie Poindexter knew he was in trouble. “Quiet, Archy! Quiet!” he whispered.
It was too late. Dressed in battle armor, helmet off to let some of the steam that had so recently been sweated seep into the equally steamy day, the marine lieutenant turned to focus a harsh, killing glare on the parakeet standing on Charlie Poindexter’s left shoulder. Ahead and behind him were the hardened troops of his platoon, trudging warily on either side of the dirt road. The tropical sun beat down on the silent clearing with murderous intensity.
The gunny sergeant and the others of the combat platoon were suddenly gathered around on either side of their lieutenant.
“Frag the lieutenant! Awr-eek!” the bird screeched as Charlie batted him in mid-squawk.
Three days of wakefulness and lots of casualties stared out of the lieutenant’s eyes as he asked in a voice made gruff from screaming too hard too long: “That bird bio’d?”
The bird was suddenly quiet and Charlie could feel his sweat chilling in his one-piece ship suit as he lied.
“Him! No sir, natural as can be!” Damn this humidity, he swore to himself, it’s playing hell with all the electronics! “Just a dumb bird.”
“Dumb dead bird soon,” one of the grunts behind him grumbled.
“Araak! Sir to an officer!” the bird screeched. Charlie batted it desperately. “Frag the lieutenant!” Charlie batted it harder but the bird dodged aside. “Incoming! Incoming!”
Shit! Charlie swore to himself. He matched stares with the lieutenant. “The bird’s just a joke, a gift from some old buddies. It’s a real Earth parakeet.”
His left arm started up to his pocket but spasmed halfway, vibrating so quickly it hummed, and then froze as far down as the wrist, while the hand began clawing and shuddering like a lost spider. Hastily, Charlie reached over with his right hand, opened the pocket, and thumbed open his wallet.
“They thought it was a good joke.”
The lieutenant swallowed hard, took his eyes off the clawing hand attached to the spasming arm, and looked at the ID on the wallet.
The man in the picture looked y
ounger and tougher than the man in front of him, but he could see the resemblance. His eyes went up to the man and back to the wallet again.
The gunny took that moment to approach and peer at the wallet ID himself. It included Poindexter’s service record. The noncom straightened suddenly and turned around to his platoon.
“All right, you bunch of slugs! No more goofing off. Let’s get set up around here!” He herded the rest of the platoon off with one respectful backward glance at Charlie, his arm half raised in a salute, hastily dropped in shame.
Charlie took the time to move his left arm to his side, pressing some special spot in the underarm which caused it to jerk suddenly and remain still. “This damned moisture!” Charlie swore.
“Yeah, it gets into all the electronics,” the lieutenant agreed hastily. He looked up again carefully and asked, “Why the parakeet?”
For a moment Charlie Poindexter remembered the charge and the explosions and the laser fire, his cheerful men being set alight like so many fireworks, how he’d held together the remnants, struggled through the night to regroup them, dragged bodies into cover, and how they’d cheerfully cursed him throughout it all.
“Frag the lieutenant!” It had been a big joke up to that point, a game he and his men had played. When the flarefire—that strange burning weapon that looked so much like a laser and acted so much like powdered white phosphorus, burning and sticking to everything it touched—had got him as he signaled the last remnants to safety, they in turn had pulled him back. Pain-racked but sure his men were in no danger of fleeing, he had joked back “Lieutenant fragged!” On the battlefield, where body parts and burned flesh were the order of the day and the only thing to hold out for was the buddy who was holding out for you, it had been high humor. It had been so funny that the whole platoon, all seven of them left out of the fifty men of the day before, had burst out laughing. Laughed their sides out.
“Battlefield humor,” he replied, remembering how his old men had come to the hospital, subdued, respectful, until one of them remembered the joke and they all laughed. He sketched the details to the lieutenant quickly, adding “Then the next day, the parakeet.”
“Sick,” the lieutenant agreed. He looked over at the parakeet again.
“You sure he’s not bio’d?”
Charlie stared back and lied again. “You think I made that bird say those things? Mister, I’ve still got some living to do!”
The lieutenant shrugged. “I’ve never seen a bio’d bird, that’s all.”
“Me neither,” Charlie agreed, lying cheerfully. “I can understand bio’d dogs, it’d be kinda useful to have a dog you could link with, but a dumb bird?” The parakeet turned its beak and took a nip at Charlie’s ear.
The lieutenant was getting fidgety. He’d spent enough time with Poindexter and that arm. “My men’re setting up,” he said. “You want a hand with that arm? My tech’s pretty good with the small stuff.”
“No, no thanks,” Charlie replied quickly. “I just have to reset it every so often in this damned muck!” He swirled his good arm in the heavy moisture that lay around them.
The lieutenant looked doubtful. “Well, if you say so.” Suddenly he asked: “What’re you doing out this far from town, anyway?”
The tone had Charlie instantly alert and he struggled not to show it. Instead, in nostalgic tones, “Heard there might be some action here, and—well, you know.”
The lieutenant did not know what Charlie was talking about, but nodded anyway. “Better head back to town soon,” he replied. “What do you do there?”
“Trader,” Charlie replied. “Got a one-manner over at the yard.”
“Risky business,” the lieutenant said disapprovingly. “You must make a fair profit.”
Charlie bridled realistically, raised his left arm, and intoned haughtily “I rather think I have a right to make up for this.” The lieutenant looked away. “Besides, I don’t have much else to do and I still can help out.”
“Whatever,” the lieutenant allowed. He turned toward his platoon. “You’d better get back to town soon, sir.” There was more tone in his “sir” than there would have been had Poindexter been a civilian. With that the lieutenant trudged off, battle armor whirring as hot motors fought for traction.
“You damned bird!” Charlie swore as soon as he was sure the lieutenant was out of sight. “I ought to break your neck right now!”
“What, and feel it, Charlie my boy?” the bird quipped back in a poor brogue. “Bio’d!” Archy sniffed.
Poindexter had no time for the simulac’s pride.
“What’d you get?”
“You got it all,” the bird told him. “KG-30 silicon gear oil with a hydroscopiscity of thirty percent, delamination of the main breastplates of ninety percent of all combat effectives, forty percent failure of all communications gear, inaccuracies of up to one hundred percent in all heads-up displays…”
“That stuff is shot. If these are typical, they’re gonna be slaughtered!” Charlie Poindexter exclaimed. “C’mon, we’ve got to get back to the ship!”
“What about informing the authorities?” The simulacrum inquired.
“Oh no! Not after the last time!” Poindexter replied, picking up his pace.
The guard at the spaceport freight yard was the first human Charlie had seen since his conversation with the marine. Tandin, the capital of powerful Isslan, was ghost-town empty. At least it was some indication that the authorities had finally come to take the alien threat seriously.
“Too late,” Archimedes declared, responding to Poindexter’s unspoken thoughts. Poindexter sighed. The evidence was overwhelming: the humans were going to lose the planet.
“If the local governments had banded together immediately into one military coalition there was only a forty percent chance of successfully countering the enemy’s military forces.”
Charlie pursed his lips. The problem was that the enemy insisted on killing every human found. The evidence was only just coming to light and still hotly contested by most of the nations of the world. They contended that it was just the Alliance’s way of getting more military aid. The politicians conveniently forgot the destruction and conquest of the states of the Coastal Coalition and made no mention at all of the Royal Islands of Anseen. The New Adriatic Alliance was composed of those island states which surrounded what had once been called the Coastal Coalition, which itself had surrounded the Royal Islands.
The planet Skylark had been inhabited centuries ago by humans, who established thousands of monarchies and anarchies among the many islands of the water world. The military forces that existed had evolved only to protect the various nations against any possible “misunderstandings” and so were purposely token in nature. If ever a nation got expansionist tendencies the surrounding nations would band together in a loose coalition and contain the perpetrator. Things being as they were, the military forces were always underequipped and overcharged by the civilian sector. Equipment was nonexistent or faulty, as Archimedes had noted of the Alliance marines assigned that sector of Tandin’s defensive perimeter.
“There has to be something,” Poindexter declared. To the parakeet simulacrum he said: “List me their known weaknesses.”
The simulacrum ruffled its feathers, muttering: “It’s a sign of inferior design to always vocalize your thoughts.” Poindexter grabbed for the simulacrum but it dodged away and began: “Known weaknesses of the Gerin…”
“Start with what we know about them instead,” Charlie interjected.
“The Gerin were first encountered on the lesser island of Marjea in the Royal Islands. Only fragmented radio reports from the islanders made it to the mainland,” Archy intoned. “When coast guard ships attempted to contact the islanders they were obliterated before they could report back. Aerial observation of the island was interdicted by some unknown form of antiaircraft weaponry later termed
‘inkjet incinerators.’ The Royal Space Station was attacked and destroyed without warning.”
The bio’d parakeet had settled back on the merchant’s shoulder.
“At this point a company of Royal Marines were loaded aboard a seawater destroyer under orders to reoccupy Marjea. Simultaneously, overtures were made to the three largest republics nearest the Royal Islands to form a military coalition while the Royal Intelligence Gatherers attempted to determine which of the neighboring nations had coveted Marjea.”
The robot bird’s presentation was clipped and toneless. It had been a week since Charlie had been given the bird and ship. Ever since, he had been unable to decide just how smart the enhanced bird was. Charlie wondered if the bird remembered he had been a Royal Marine. There certainly was no hesitation as it continued its recitation.
“The devastation of the company of Royal Marines was not complete, although three of the eight survivors were thought to have been eaten by some sea animal previously not known but later identified as the Gerin themselves. Neighboring space stations were destroyed on the night of the first landing of the Gerin on the main island. Within three days the Gerin had reached the outskirts of the capital and the neighboring nations had agreed to form a military coalition with troops arriving within the week.”
Charlie shuddered. They didn’t get the week. He remembered how his company had been annihilated in twelve minutes, how his shattered platoon had “held the door open” for the remnants of the Royal Battalion. He remembered the long torturous night and the agony of his seared arm. The fleeing Royal Islands forces were evacuated to the nearest unoccupied islands, but those were overrun in the following days.
The Gerin attacked in threes, one in the lead and two on either side. The leader invariably was better equipped and tore through defenders with a ferocity that left limbs and entrails strewn over meters. On the ground, the Gerin were unstoppable. In the air, the Gerin had developed sophisticated aircraft capable of outflying all the manually controlled aircraft the Coalition and now the Alliance could pit against them. The space forces of the Alliance were engaged in the strictly defensive role of trying to maintain exterior lines against interior forces. The Gerin fought a reverse siege, the humans on the defensive outside of the conquered territory, the Gerin savagely expanding their conquests from the inside.
