by David Drake
Unseen, across fifteen yards of tropical greenery, Scott was combat-clicking to him via head mike. The squad had passed through the outer circle of defenses and were hiding in groups of three and four in the undergrowth. The spotter had determined how far it was from their position to the inner circle. She indicated, via clicktalk, that the Gerin had buried a wire in a ring attached to sensors instead of an outer line of defense and the churned-up ground on the topo map she sent him with a flick of her glove control meant deadfalls, both of which were more to scare off the indigenous animal life than safeguard a military entrenchment. They didn’t seem to be expecting much in the way of an invading force. Then Barlow recognized the heat signature of unmanned laser weaponry far ahead.
Being water creatures, Gerin liked to hole up in the wettest, lowest ground possible. The troop was risking attack by holing up in the bushes, but Barlow didn’t want to expose his position before he had to just to keep moving. The Gerin weren’t stupid. Even if he put his men on the march, the Gerin would just count heads and wait until they stopped.
Barlow was quickly losing interest in penetrating the Gerin’s perimeter. There was no one, not one single human, left alive on Skylark’s surface after the Slime invaded. All that the fleet needed to do was drop neutron bombs on the swamp until nothing else moved. Scuttlebutt was that at HQ everyone hated the idea of this mission. Maybe that’s why there were no officers in charge. Everyone, that is, except Ubiquitous Smith.
Barlow knew Corporal Smith’s real first name, but Ubiquitous seemed to suit him so much better. There was never a man in his command who seemed to be in more places at once—especially ones he shouldn’t be in. He was the original cadet who was known to have been out drinking in town when his boot camp sergeant would swear under oath at a disciplinary hearing that he’d seen Smith asleep in his bunk—and that two separate ladies on opposite ends of town each claimed to have him with her that night.
Smith was openly enjoying the presence of the videographer. He turned his faceplate toward the camera occasionally, showing a fierce, noble countenance or a confident smile. When Barlow gave the order to move in closer, Smith flung himself onto his belly and elbows right in front of Vinson, and scrambled. At least Barlow wasn’t worrying about Smith’s competence; the man was the veteran of numerous campaigns. It was his damned ego that was so annoying.
Jammers activated, they crossed the line of sensors.
Scott indicated by a quick click that no transmission with their names on it had gone toward the Gerin camp. Inside the perimeter, the ambient humidity rose sharply, indicating that the water table was much higher here. The ground underfoot was saturated and spongy. In full combat gear, carrying heavy cargo nets and backpacks, the men left deep prints that became oval pools before the next boot toe or elbow hit the ground. Barlow’s olfactory sensors gave him a clammy wave of swamp odors that curdled his nostrils. There was still no sign of occupied Gerin defenses, but they were still fifty feet from the inner ring. The slimeballs must be relying completely on whatever made up that defense line to protect them.
The marines lived by the motto “Do what is necessary and then get the hell out.” Even if the mission was a turkey, they were carrying a new, powerful depth charge especially designed to be used against Gerin bases. These were small as a raise in pay and heavy as the burden of sin, but they packed a mean kick when exposed to the correct psi. Barlow was as interested as the brain trust back on board ship to see what kind of effect the charges had in the field. Anything that made it easier to get the job done was a plus. But he wondered about taking experimental ordnance on a publicity exercise. The charge’s greatest drawback was that the pair of cylindrical charges rolled around in the cargo nets, unbalancing the troopers carrying them. Earlier, after nearly falling on a partially exposed land mine, one of the men complained about the awkwardness over their headset radios as they crawled. Barlow barked a quick order for radio silence.
Ubiquitous was also carrying a slugthrower loaded with cartridges he had filled with salt powder and alum. Some of the others had a few specials of their own, which normally they would not be allowed to carry, but this was a special occasion. Barlow figured that if they were going to die in a stupid cause, they might as well have fun doing it. Beside the regulation-issue firearms, sheath knife, and saber, he himself wore a razor knife which normally rested in a slit in the metal side of his personal locker.
They crept forward on their bellies through sodden masses of rotting vegetation. The moist smells grew steadily worse as they approached the perimeter. Barlow finally had to turn off his smell sensors. They would tell him nothing he really needed to know. He heard gagging from more than one of the others in the company. The very atmosphere was attacking them. Even with the olfactory sensors deactivated, the filtered air still contained enough moisture to cloud up his faceplate. He nosed the dehumidifier control to dry it out, which also took care of a lot of the water-borne odors.
Dawn was breaking through the trees to planetary east, extending thin needles of light through the heavy foliage over their heads. An infrared trace of sunlight was beginning to interfere with the telemetry readings of his helmet’s sensors. In response to a query, Scott clicked to Barlow that they were only five feet from the line of primary defense. Her readings were fixed from the time they had come over the horizon of the planet. The signature of hot laser weapons warming up in the treetops showed that the slimeballs knew they were coming but wouldn’t trouble themselves to come out and make a personal attack. For a moment, the sergeant hoped that there were only a few in the base. It would give his men better odds of survival. The octopoidal Gerin always fought in threes. Two apprentices flanked and defended a warrior, who did most of the actual attacking. If the warrior was killed, the apprentices tended to lose their fighting edge and become easy victims.
Laser fire is silent and invisible to the naked eye. Unless one’s helmet sensors are switched to infrared and facing toward the emplacement for the brief milliseconds when it fires, you can miss seeing the attack. Barlow’s screen showed a red line etched momentarily on the green-black mass of hanging vines, just as Scott cried out, “Incoming!”
“Roll!” Barlow bellowed over the comlink. Before them, the ground erupted as vegetation caught fire and leaped into the air. The small screen inside his helmet below his faceplate was already showing suit telemetry from one of his men who had been scored down the back of his leg by the laser. The beam hadn’t broken suit integrity, but the heat had fried the light armor’s circuits, and had surely raised the temperature inside the suit.
“Retreat! Return fire! Any burns, Clarke?” he rapped, as the company hastily fell back. The lasers etched hissing lines in the muck in front of them, and then stopped when the company had backed up ten meters.
“Nossir,” the marine replied, over the link. “Just hot, that’s all.”
“Injuries, report,” Barlow requested, nudging the control with his chin to open his frequency to the whole company. A few men complained of burns on their suits, but only two had been wounded by the laser barrage. One couldn’t feel his left hand, and the other had been burned where the laser had holed the suit on his back and wouldn’t be much good in the near future. Fortunately, the crystalline fiber of the outer layer of the marine all-terrain uniform took much of the power out of laser attacks.
“Has that unit of yours got an infrared lens?” Ubiquitous asked the cameraman. “Otherwise you’re going to miss all the action.”
“Radio silence,” the sergeant bellowed at his second.
“All the laser units are still intact! Where are they?”
“I’ve got them, sir,” Scott interjected, “Three laser emplacements in the immediate area. That fold of land to the west is protecting us from the laser in that quadrant. I’m getting no visual on them at all, just the heat signature.” Scott’s glove control gave him the map with hot spots high up in the trees.
“Too much spread to get a clear fix. Those units must be leaking power like nobody’s business,” Barlow complained. “Damned slimeballs must have a full-scale nuclear generator in their camp. Kalin, Smith, take them down before they hurt somebody. Blow up the trees.”
“That won’t make very good video,” Vinson noted mildly as Smith wriggled into position, clutching his slugthrower.
“Did I ask you?” Barlow demanded over his shoulder, and then went redfaced as he realized that his outburst was now on disk for all the brass to see.
Vinson smiled through his faceplate, understanding the sergeant’s embarrassment, and touched the side of his helmet. “I’ve already erased that, Sergeant. Sorry. You only want to do this once, don’t you?” Once again he hefted the small cylinder which was the hand-held component of the videocam.
Picturing an endless campaign of useless missions, Barlow was aghast. “They wouldn’t dare send us out again for this kind of trivia!”
“We can make it more interesting,” Smith offered, holding up his slugthrower. “Kalin and I have won medals for sharpshooting.”
“Just get it over with,” Barlow hissed. “I don’t want to spend the rest of my life here.”
From Scott’s unit hidden in the brush to the left, Kalin appeared, crawling on his elbows and knees, carefully keeping his slugthrower up out of the mud. He was a slender, hatchet-faced man with black hair, and Barlow noticed that he was carrying one of the depth charges in his pack. He took his place beside Smith. “Now what are we supposed to do?” he asked with friendly interest. “I’ve never been on trivid before.”
Vinson must have sensed Barlow’s incipient outburst, and spoke quickly. “Nothing special. Take out the emplacements, just as if I wasn’t here.” Barlow counted ten and let his drawn breath out, and nodded to the two marines.
The heat traces showed the defense lasers had gone back to a ready state, but without targets weren’t fully live. Kalin shrugged and took a lying-down firing stance beside Smith, who was already in perfect rifle-range form.
“At the word ‘fire,’ FIRE,” commanded Barlow. The explosive rounds ripped through the foliage toward the center of two of the heat points, and detonated with a blast of flame.
“Oh, shit!” Kalin cried, as infrared showed the red lines of returned laser fire directly toward him, scoring a smoking line on his suit sleeve. “I thought we were out of swing range!” He beat at the laser score and sank the sleeve into the swamp ooze to cool it down.
“This must be the kind that fires back at the position from which it was shot at,” Smith speculated meditatively. “I guess you missed, Kalin. Move over about ten meters behind that tree and fire at it again.”
Obediently, the other marine rolled to the tree and took aim at the clump of brush they thought was a laser emplacement. He glanced toward Smith, who nodded, and fired. Barlow could see on his screen that Kalin’s shell detonated millimeters below the center of the target. Almost as quickly as that information registered, the tree was assaulted by lines of fiery red. Smith stood up and fired from the shoulder toward the laser. Erupting at full power, it exploded in a sky-high shower of sparks. No more laser bolts came.
“Is that it?” Barlow asked over his headset when the last echoes of the blast died away. “There was a third heat trace. Why isn’t it firing at us?”
“I’ve analyzed it,” Scott said, from behind the hanging curtains of broadleaf swamp vines. “Sir, it’s not a laser. It’s a video pickup.”
“Well, I’ll be damned. They’re making a home movie, too!” Barlow exclaimed. “Come on, move out!”
From the point of the smoking line left behind by the lasers, the land sloped downhill still farther. Barlow ordered every man, injured or not, to keep moving. Hidden inside the rotten banks of leaves, thick vines caught unexpectedly on feet and cargo nets as they slithered toward the Gerin stronghold. He led the way into a leaf-filled gully that provided a fairly even 60-degree descent.
Morale was already slipping; Barlow could feel it. Not only were they being put on disk, they were being watched by the enemy. No action they had taken before had ever been so redundantly observed. Scott identified two or three other video units suspended from or between trees along their path. Kalin destroyed them with skillfully aimed shots as he followed her. The unexpected trickle of a small stream which crossed their path sufficiently saturated some of the wounded men’s gear that circuits shorted out with fat sparks, and headset contact was intermittent.
“On your feet,” Barlow ordered, and the company rose and advanced, brushing away streamers and trailers of sickly green which dripped over their faceplates and shoulders. The raucous cry of some creature rang through the silence, deafening in the amplified speakers inside each marine’s helmet. As if it were a signal, the other marsh animals and birds set up their own outcry, drowning out the more subtle sounds which might help the company detect the approach of their enemy.
Abruptly, they broke through into a clearing.
“This is it, sir,” Scott said, emerging next to him, holding her terrain map on her outstretched palms. Ubiquitous appeared next, followed by Vinson, whose lens was trained on the corporal.
“This is it? This is what?” Barlow asked incredulously.
“The base. The encampment.”
“So where are the Gerin? I thought this place was full of them.”
Scott shrugged. “This is where the telemetry places large life forms whose readings match those of the Gerin.” The other marines crowded in behind them. Barlow gestured to them to stay partly hidden in the undergrowth while he took a quick look around.
He didn’t think much of the clearing himself, as either a base, or a summer home, or a place in which he’d be caught dead. It looked like a junkyard for decayed office plants. The clearing was nearly waist-deep in narrow, pliable yellow reeds. Underneath them the ground was sodden, making footing uncertain. Huge, tonguelike leaves lay obscenely sprawled across moss-covered boulders and rotten stumps. Incongruously, lovely white flowers grew out of pools of bright green, which Barlow knew must be standing water underneath no more than a half inch of algae crust. Marsh insects with high-pitched whines buzzed annoyingly in his ears. An extruded-plastic building was all but hidden by fast -growing marsh plants. There was a low entrance through which one of them would have to crawl, provided they didn’t decide to blow the thing up from where they stood. The power plant was a small boxlike unit which hummed quietly at the side of the building. Barlow looked up. For the first time he could see the sky, and decided he hadn’t been missing anything. It was a grayish purple and mostly overcast. He tried to take a step forward and discovered that he had sunk knee deep into the bog.
“Treacherous footing throughout the clearing, sir,” Scott noted helpfully.
“So where are they?” Barlow asked.
“In the pool, sir.” The pool was a larger stagnant body of water covering more than half of the compound. Its surface was perfectly still, except for the tiny rippling rings made when one of the whining insects touched briefly down. From its center rose an irregular rocky promontory, like a reef. Scott consulted her table again, moved a wrist control under its translucent surface. “I count twenty-one Gerin. Yes, confirmed.”
Twenty-one. The same number as the company. Barlow wondered if Captain Avix had known the exact count of the enemy when he chose his volunteers. One-on-one combat might look very pretty in the movies, but it would be sheer bloodshed to attack an entrenched foe with only equal numbers. Again, he cursed the brass for sending them on such a fool’s mission.
“Kalin, prepare to launch depth charge,” he commanded.
“Uh, sir,” Kalin answered reluctantly, “they didn’t supply any for us. The weapon’s too new; they haven’t designed a launcher yet.”
“Then go and throw it in the water, soldier!” Barlow roared. Vinson threw himself to one knee and he
ld the camera eye against his shoulder as Kalin squelched out unsteadily across the reeds. Hundreds of round-bodied marsh hoppers, disturbed by his passage, leaped crazily about, shrieking and chirping. Startled, he lost his balance and dropped the heavy charge into the grass. Everyone gasped and ducked, protecting their helmets. The charge didn’t go off. As Barlow searched the cloudy heavens for strength, Kalin recovered the bomb and crossed the rest of the way to the pool, haloed by a cloud of marsh hoppers. The look backward he gave, waiting for the command, wasn’t for Barlow, but for Vinson. “Throw it,” the sergeant ordered, trying to ignore the trivid man at his feet. Kalin drew back his arm and tossed the small canister overhand toward the water.
A mass of tentacles broke the brown surface of the pool. Some grabbed for the falling cylinder, curling closed too late as it slipped between them. Three sets, all clad in the sleeves of environmental suits, seized Kalin and dragged him under the water. More Gerin boiled out of the water and rolled purposefully toward the company. They didn’t exactly roll, or walk, or crawl, but performed a combination of all three. There was no good way to express their form of ambulation in human terms.
“Kalin!” Barlow called, then switched to headset radio. “Kalin, respond! Is your rebreather circuit functioning?”
“Sergeant, a Gerin triad got me. I can breathe okay.
I’ve got my knife and laser pistol, but the warrior I’m facing has the same, and two of his feet have iron claws fastened on to ‘em. I can’t back away far. The apprentices have got me flanked. Wait, I can see the depth charge down below. It’s still falling—”
