The Far Stars War

by David Drake

  Kalin’s voice cut off. Behind the emerging Gerin, the waters of the pool suddenly rose up in a cloudlike bubble with a roar like a launching rocket. Waves of fetid water dropped on the company and the enemy, knocking both forces off their feet and tentacles, respectively. Barlow rolled over but didn’t rise, calling to his men to open fire on the Gerin triads moving toward them.

  The company traded laser fire with the Gerin amid the falling water and pieces of rock. Barlow realized that he and his marines were at a disadvantage with the slope at their back. They hadn’t taken the opportunity to choose an advantageous position, a mistake which could cost them all their lives. Under covering fire from two of the other triads, six Gerin, with the warriors well ahead of the smaller and less gaudily arrayed apprentices, closed in on them. Barlow ordered Hotchkiss, Omaya, Ivorsen, and three others to engage the first trio of Gerin.

  The slimeballs undulated toward the humans in the same graceful, hypnotic way a tree sways in the wind. It could kill a soldier if he got caught looking and forgot what he was looking at. These were clad in heavy eight-legged environment suits made of a glistening brown rubbery compound. From the extra sway, Barlow suspected the suits were filled with water, to protect the Gerin’s flesh from drying out in the air. It would also provide a second buffer layer between a slug or laser bolt. That meant a minimum of three shots to kill instead of two: one to pierce the suit and let the water out, one to wound, and one to finish.

  The big goblin eyes stared out at Barlow’s men through the round faceplates. All around the sergeant, the company were unpacking their special armaments. Weapons that had been outlawed by the Jupiter Convention were turned out of rucksacks and cargo nets. Barlow swept a swift, astonished glance over his shoulder, then returned his attention to the fighting. A tall woman named Ricci slipped out of the clearing and vanished into the perimeter with a coil of synthfiber.

  Hotchkiss was nervous. He missed his first shot with the slugthrower. His buddy opened fire with a laser rifle and scored across the “neck” of the first Gerin warrior’s environment suit. The material was tougher than Barlow’s first estimation of it. Water dripped slowly down the creature’s knees and into the reeds, but no major breach had been cut. Hotchkiss cocked and fired again, but the triad were already on top of them. The warrior pushed him out of the way and into the arms of his assistants. An iron-tipped tentacle pierced through the body of Omaya’s suit and withdrew, leaving a trail of blood down the front. The private looked down in astonishment and slowly folded up. Hotchkiss let out a bellow and blew a large hole in the head of the assistant holding him. He struggled free of the flailing arms and tried to kick his way to his friend’s body.

  “Private Hotchkiss, pay goddam attention to what you’re doing!” Barlow called. He aimed his own slugthrower and fired, propelling an explosive charge squarely into the faceplate of the second assistant, who was about to spit Hotchkiss on a tentacle as his friend had been. There was a horrible squelching, tearing noise, and the Gerin dropped like a sack of laundry with most of its head blown away. The marine staggered away into the reeds and sat down, obviously in shock, as the other four attacked the now-unprotected warrior. Barlow and the rest provided return covering fire for them and for Hotchkiss, invisible in the marshweeds. The fight was only beginning. And behind them, Vinson was recording it all.

  Barlow detailed another group of men to attack the second triad, now advancing on the company. Scott had folded up her telemetry equipment and was firing on the leftmost trio of armed Gerin with a narrow-barreled rifle. Her slugthrower shot hypodermic-shaped bullets which caught and pierced softer materials, like rubber, or insulation, or flesh, and exploded on contact. One of the Gerin showed the characteristic wound on its body immediately below its eyeplate. Its exposed flesh color alternated with the purple of fury and the sickly green of pain. Two of its tentacles applied a white dressing to the wound while two more fired an energy weapon erratically toward the group.

  “See, in one-on-one combat, a human has little chance of defeating a Gerin—you know, hand-to-hand-to-hand-to-hand-to-hand-to-hand . . .” Ubiqutous explained cheerfully to the cameraman as he put two shells into his slugthrower, one small and one large. “But you can knock them off their feet with the right combination. Like this.” He put the weapon to his shoulder, aimed, and pulled the trigger. The small shell impacted in the top of a Gerin’s rubbery hood. It stopped shooting at the marines and put two of its arms up to search the bullet hole, and exposed a span of its underside to Smith. With a crow of triumph, Smith fired. The larger shell took the Gerin full in the bottom and propelled it into the air. All eight legs stretched out to their tips, then curled up as the slime fell to the ground and lay still.

  “Smith, save it for target practice,” Barlow said wearily. His ears were still ringing with the death cries of two marines, pulled out of their suits and strangled by the second Gerin warrior. His gunmen cut the warrior nearly in half with a barrage of slugs, and mowed down the confused apprentices left suddenly leaderless. More wounded moved back from the fighting line, to be replaced by fresh men, but Barlow knew that his roster was dwindling quickly. He wanted to finish and get out.

  “Could you turn this way slightly, Sergeant?” Vinson asked. “I’d like to get your reaction shot to Smith’s success. Sorry to intrude.”

  Barlow turned, wishing all wise-asses and cameramen buried fifty feet deep in peat, but careful to keep his thoughts off his face. Smith did his trick on another Gerin sharpshooter, this one the warrior on the right side of the field. The sergeant had to admit that it was an impressive move. He’d have to make the corporal teach it to the other marksmen at practice on shipboard. The remaining marines tripped and crawled over the reeds to attack its apprentices, whose flesh through their eyeplates was light pink with fear. Barlow led the attack on the left-hand nest, which still contained the warrior and one apprentice. His feet sank into the ground a good six inches with every step, making the going next to impossible. Disgusted, he undid the strap holding on his cargo net with one hand as he ran, and threw the heavy bag onto the ground. It flattened the grasses and floated, buoyant on the hollow reeds.

  Cries of triumph from across the field announced that the other squad had dispatched the remaining assistant of the right-hand triad. Ten Gerin were dead so far, but five humans had died, too.

  The warrior was more heavily armed than any of the other three. It kept the marines dodging laser and slug fire.

  “Hey, Sarge!” yelled a voice over the head mikes.

  “No, up!” From his position facedown in the reeds, Barlow looked up. Private Ricci was five meters high in a tree, waving a loop of her rope, which was anchored to a branch above her. She gave him thumbs up.

  “Good, Ricci! Drop it on that damned warrior. We can’t get near him. “Barlow made a gesture with the flat of his hand.

  Two more of his men went down under slug fire before the loop fell. Before the Gerin could do more than look up, Ricci jerked the rope tight and hauled down on the loose end. The warrior was lifted into the air, its face red with fury, tentacles waving like a barroom wagonwheel chandelier. Though it kept hold of the laser pistol, its furious shots hit no one but some inoffensive trees. The heavier slugthrower fell from its grasp.

  Unfortunately, the Gerin had a pretty good reach even suspended six feet in the air. It continued to stab at everyone with the two iron-tipped tentacles. The human marksmen peppered it with slugs, which it ignored, even though water and ichor dripped from holes in the rubbery suit. The apprentice got in everyone’s way, swinging hysterical blows at the soldiers with a few of its legs while trying to pull its master down. Barlow heard a wild scream over the headsets as the warrior’s iron claw penetrated the joint between Ivorsen’s helmet and suit. The metal must have pierced the jugular vein. In only seconds Ivorsen’s vitals slowed to zero, and the man collapsed.

  “Higher, Ricci!” Barlow called, sloshing forwa
rd to catch the body.

  “All right, Sarge, but it’s only five feet from me now!”

  With an effort, the woman hauled on the rope hand over hand. The warrior’s flailing arms went slack as the jerk of the rope caught it by surprise. It was not caught off guard for long. As soon as it was in reach, it attacked Ricci with all its resources, stabbing and lasing the private, who did her best to hang on to the rope and keep steady. Blood from half a dozen wounds seeped in shimmering ribbons down the front of her environment suit.

  “Smith!” the sergeant shouted.

  “I see him, Sarge,” came the cheerful voice of Smith.

  Just as it seemed Ricci was about to let go, the hiss of a shell from a slugthrower barrel whizzed overhead. The Gerin exploded from within, and ceased its attacks on Ricci, just as her hands went slack. She collapsed against the bole of the tree and her head fell back. The rope, released from her grip, shot upward, and the limp body of the warrior fell heavily to the ground, in front of its apprentice.

  Squealing, the surviving Gerin broke free of the marines and rolled hastily to the pool. It dove in under a hail of bullets, and vanished, leaving a greasy trace of ichor on top of the water.

  “Coward!” Barlow crowed. “Good shot, Smith.

  Ricci, are you all right?”

  “I’m alive, Sarge,” her voice came weakly over the comlink. “If you don’t need me, I’d better stay up here . . . for a while.”

  Her vital signs showed that she was probably in shock.

  Barlow ordered her to program a relaxant from her medkit, and turned back to the field of battle. There were no more Gerin alive on the surface.

  “There should be ten left alive down there, sir,” Scott replied to a query. “Three trios, and the apprentice we just saw.”

  “Those’ll probably be the high-rankers, the administrators, at the bottom,” Barlow speculated. “They’d wait until most of us were killed, and then come out to knock off the rest and claim the victory for themselves.” Officers, he reflected, were all alike, no matter what they looked like.

  “But I’m not getting the readings of body heat any more,” Scott said. “Either they’ve escaped through an underground stream, or they have some sort of cooling mechanism in those suits to disguise them.”

  “How can we detect them, then?”

  The spotter considered the question. “Movement?”

  “Chuck the second grenade at them,” Smith suggested. “Hotchkiss has it.” The private had recovered from his friend’s death and was eager to get revenge on the slimeballs. He flourished the heavy little canister.

  “No,” the sergeant said, forestalling them. “I don’t want to waste it if there are no Gerin down there to blast.” His eye fell on the trivid man and his camera unit. “Say, Vinson, you want to get a really good shot? Come here.”

  He dragged the protesting cameraman through the threshed-down grasses to the pool’s edge and pulled him to his knees. “There, take a look down through there.” He pulled the lens unit out of the man’s hands and thrust it into the water.

  “I don’t see anything, Sergeant,” Vinson said. “The water’s too murky.”

  “They recognized the shape, sir. They’re moving away,” Scott announced joyously, transmitting the images to her CO’s screen. “They’re down there. All ten are on the north edge of the pool.”

  “Hotchkiss! Prepare to deploy depth charge!”

  With a toothy, feral smile, the young marine dashed to the far end and heaved the bomb into the water with both hands. He watched, sinking knee deep in mud, as the charge detonated, carrying most of the murky pool water high into the air. It fell on him like a wave breaking. When the air cleared, Barlow could see that the rocky promontory in the middle was gone. But Hotchkiss was still standing on the bank.

  “No life forms left in the water, sir,” Scott announced through the cheers of her fellows. “We got ‘em all.”

  “A bang-up ending, if I may say so,” Vinson complimented them. “This is going to look terrific on video.”

  The cheering died away, and the surviving marines glanced at each other warily. Many of them had forgotten the cameraman’s presence, and eyed him as if he were one of the slime. Even Smith was looking askance at his pet videographer now that the reality had struck him.

  “Real people, men and women, died today,” Barlow said, and knew that every marine there felt the same way. “Friends of mine. Kids, some of them. Those weren’t actors. I’ll throw you and that camera in the pool myself with a brick sinker before I let their deaths go for a lousy exploitation vidisk.”

  “The folks back home need to know the ugly realities of the Gerin war,” Vinson explained apologetically, crossing a protective arm across his camera unit. “We need their support to fight this war and win. Yes, those were real men and women, with interests and hopes beyond their service in the LFP, just as you are. Maybe you don’t know how much a fantasy this war seems to the people on the more distant planets, who have never seen a Gerin and don’t know anyone who has. This disk is for them.”

  “It still stinks,” croaked Ricci grimly, limping up to join them. The blood on her suit had been washed away by Hotchkiss’s geyser, but her face was pasty.

  As they made their way back up the hill to pickup point, Barlow considered. He agreed with a lot of what Vinson was saying, though he didn’t like any of it. There was nothing worse than having units shortchanged on money or gear because the finance committees back home didn’t understand the threat out on the front line. It didn’t affect them, therefore it didn’t exist. The kids in the service tried so hard. This company, even as an untried, scratch unit, had done pretty well. He would be proud to lead them as a special squad. He wanted to throw the disk into the pool and refuse to let the brass make another video until the big men up top came down in person to pose with the Gerin.

  Most of the marines were wounded, some beyond the abilities of the medical service to cure completely. They tried to make themselves and their buddies comfortable without too much bitching while they waited for the transport ship to retrieve them from the top of the slope. A few would wear their disfigurements openly, though prosthetics would replace severed limbs. As usual, Ubiquitous Smith had come out of it without a mark on him, but he was almost the only one. Barlow resented him and resented Vinson, but most of all, he hated the brass-hatted fools who had put a company of strangers down on a planet where they never needed to be.

  Barlow was still trying to make up his mind whether or not to lase a hole in the cameraman’s storage disk when the transport ship picked them up.

  WAR HAS many effects. It can make cowards out of otherwise reasonable men, and heroes out of the least likely candidates. During a war, science seems to surge ahead, and business booms. More than for anyone else, the Far Stars War was a personal quest for revenge for Chu Lee Macdonald. Born and raised on Castleman’s, Mac, as he was almost universally referred to, commanded the remnants of the fleet that tried to defend her. It is an indication of the man that he ordered his ships to remain in combat, outnumbered ten to one, until there was no hope of evacuating survivors. It is a further indication of his leadership, and the temper of those manning the ships, that his orders were obeyed at such a high cost.

  Physically, Mac was not exceptional. He stood slightly taller than average and had a slight frame that masked his height. Mac had inherited from his mother hair of a particularly rich, glossy black. His features were regular, and those who knew him before Castleman’s said a smile once came easily to them. The admiral’s eyes were such a deep blue as to be almost black. Even on trivid recordings there is a riveting quality to those eyes, and a pool of sorrow that was never to drain away.

  In the dark weeks after Castleman’s fell, Mac was an officer. He reorganized the surviving ships and used them to intimidate other worlds into contributing to his force. He drove the men, though no har
der than he drove himself. The last survivors of their world, the men carried ghosts with them, and it was best that they fell exhausted into their hammocks. .

  Mac had once had a family, though after the fall their picture disappeared from his desk. Even after the victories at Gemini and Klaremont, Mac would drive himself until he collapsed from exhaustion. War demands an exceptional leader; amazingly often one appears. In the past there had been Churchill, then Wainford and Ben Aleef, and Fleisher, who saved Earth at the beginning of man’s expansion. The Far Stars War created Mac, and in many ways Mac made the war his own—needed its all-encompassing cause to fill the emptiness inside himself.

  Mankind needed a diplomat, and a trivid hero, to rally behind. Mac supplied this requirement with careful calculation. After his first victories, the need to unify humanity became as great an obsession as destroying the Gerin. Once he had wooed and coerced the League of Free Planets into joining forces with him, there was never any question who would really be in control: the homeless admiral became more ruthless in his insistence that every human world join his crusade. Sometimes his tactics were questioned; more often, they were ignored by men more concerned with surviving the next Gerin assault. Even when he destroyed thousands of colonists on Goldsack, the destruction was forgotten in the fury of the Battle of Ten Moons and the euphoria of that hard-fought victory.

  THERE WAS a planet, only I don’t remember the name. It had to be in a system somewhere, but I can’t recall that, either. The scum who inhabited it were rebels, humans, some kind of religious cult, I can manage that much. They refused to join the fight against the Gerin, they told Admiral Chu Lin MacDonald to take his League and jam it, they were rogues, they were traitors, and they would die to the last man before they would send one soldier to an immoral war, they said.

  I can remember that much.

  And there are other parts of it I remember. I think.