The Far Stars War

by David Drake

  Meanwhile the engineers went to work on that strip just as if they were being shot at. Dust went up in clouds, blown away from our side of the strip by a light breeze. Under that dust, the craters and humps and leftover chunks of our troop shuttle disappeared, and a smooth, level landing strip emerged. There’s nothing engineers like better than pushing dirt around, and these guys pushed it fast.

  By dark they had it roughed in pretty well, and showed us another surprise. Lights. Those tires we’d laughed at each held a couple of lamps and reflectors, and the coiled wiring that connected them all into a set of proper landing lights controlled by a masterboard and powered from an earthmover engine. By the time everyone had had chow, the first replacement shuttle was coming in, easing down to the lighted strip as if this were practice on a safe, peaceful planet far from the war.

  None of us veterans could relax and enjoy it, though.

  The new arrivals had heard the same thing I had—thirty percent losses on the initial drop, sixty shuttles blown. No report from anyone on what we’d done to the Gerin, which meant that the navy hadn’t done a damn thing . . . they tripled their figures when they did, but triple zilch is still zilch. So how come we weren’t being overrun by Gerin infantry? Or bombed by their fighters? What were the miserable Slime up to? They sure weren’t beat, and they don’t surrender.

  During the night, five more shuttles landed, unloaded, and took off again. Besides the additional troops and supplies, we also had a new commanding officer, a meanlooking freckle-faced major named Sewell. I know it’s not fair to judge someone by his looks, but he had one of those narrow faces set in a permanent scowl, with tight-bunched muscles along his jaw. He probably looked angry sound asleep, and I’d bet his wife (he had a wide gold ring on the correct finger) had learned to hop on cue. His voice fit the rest of him, edged and ready to bite deep at any resistance. The captain had a wary look; I’d never served with Sewell, or known anyone who had, but evidently the captain knew something.

  Major Sewell seemed to know what he was doing, though, and his first orders made sense, in a textbook way. If you wanted to try something as impossible as defending a shuttle strip without enough troops or supplies, his way was better than most. Soon we had established a perimeter that was secure enough, dug into each of the main hills around the strip, each with its own supply of ammo, food, and water. Besides the original headquarters and med dugout, he’d established another on the far side of the strip. All this looked pretty good, with no Gerin actually challenging it, but I wasn’t convinced. It takes more than a few hundred marines to secure an airstrip if the enemy has a lot of troops.

  Shortly after sundown, one of the squads from the first replacement shuttle found ruins of a human settlement at the base of a hill near the end of the strip, and had to get their noses slapped on the comm for making so much noise about it. Not long after, the squad up on that clifftop put two and two together and made their own find. Having heard the first ruckus, they didn’t go on the comm with it, but sent a runner down to Major Sewell.

  There’s a certain art to getting information, another version of politics, you might call it. It so happened that someone I knew had a buddy who knew someone, and so on, and I knew the details before the runner got to Major Sewell.

  We’d known the strip itself was human-made, from the beginning. What we hadn’t known was that it had been privately owned, adjacent to the owner’s private residence. It takes a fair bit of money to build a shuttle strip, though not as much as it takes to have a shuttle and need a shuttle strip. The same class of money can take a chunk of rock looking out over a little valley and carve into it a luxurious residence and personal fortress. It can afford to install the best-quality automated strip electronics to make landing its fancy little shuttle easier, and disguise all the installations as chunks of native stone or trees or whatever. The Gerin had missed it, being unfamiliar with both the world and the way that humans think of disguise. But to a bored squad sitting up on a hilltop with no enemy in sight, and the knowledge that someone might have hidden something ... to them it was easy. Easy to find, that is, not easy to get into, at least not without blasting a way in ... which, of course, they were immediately and firmly told not to do.

  Think for a little what it takes to do something like this. We’re not talking here about ordinary dress-up-in-silk-everyday rich, you understand, not the kind of rich that satisfies your every whim for enough booze and fancy food. I can’t even imagine the sort of sum that would own a whole world, hollow out a cliff for a home, operate a private shuttle, and still have enough clout left to bribe the navy in the middle of a desperate war. This was the sort of wealth that people thought the military-industrial complex had, the kind that the big commercial consortia do have (whether the military get any or not), the kind where one man’s whim, barely expressed, sends ten thousand other men into a death-filled sky.

  Or that’s the way I read it. We were here to protect—to get back—some rich man’s estate, his private playground, that the Gerin had taken away. Not because of colonists (did I see any colonists? Did anyone see any evidence of colonists?) but because of a rich old fart who had kept this whole world to himself, and then couldn’t protect it. That’s why we couldn’t do the safe, reasonable thing and bomb the Gerin into dust, why we hadn’t had adequate site preparation, why we hadn’t brought down the tactical nukes. Politics.

  I did sort of wonder why the Gerin wanted it. Maybe they had their own politics? I also wondered if anyone was hiding out in there, safe behind the disguising rock, watching us fight ... lounging at ease, maybe, with a drink in his hand, enjoying the show. We could take care of that later, too. If we were here.

  Sometime before dawn—still dark, but over half the night gone—the higher flyspy reported distant activity. Lights and non-visible heat sources over at the edge of the hills, moving slowly but steadily toward us. They didn’t follow the old road trace, but kept to the low ground. According to the best guess of the instruments, the wettest low ground. I guess that makes sense, if you’re an amphib. It still didn’t make sense that they moved so slow, and that they hadn’t come to hit us while we were setting up.

  The next bad news came from above. Whatever the navy had thought they’d done to get the Gerin ships out of the way, it hadn’t held, and the next thing we knew our guys boosted out of orbit and told us to hold the fort while they fought off the Gerin. Sure. The way things were going, they weren’t coming back, and we wouldn’t be here if they did. Nobody said that, which made it all the clearer that we were all thinking it. During that long day we made radio contact with the survivors at Beta site. They were about eighty klicks away to our north, trying to move our way through the broken hills and thick scrub. Nobody’d bothered them yet, and they hadn’t found any sign of human habitation. Surprise. The major didn’t tell them what we’d found, seeing as it wouldn’t do them any good. Neither would linking up with us, probably.

  The smart thing to do, if anyone had asked me, was for us to boogie on out of there and link with the Betasite survivors, and see what we could do as a mobile strike force. Nobody asked me, at least nobody up top, where the orders came from. We were supposed to hold the strip, so there we stuck, berries on a branch ready for picking. I know a lot of the guys thought the same way I did, but hardly anyone mentioned it, seeing it would do no good and we’d have a lot more to bitch about later.

  Slow as the Gerin were moving, we had time to set up several surprises, fill every available container with water, all that sort of thing. They ignored our flyspy, so we could tell where they were, what they had with them, estimate when they’d arrive. It was spooky ... but then they didn’t need to bother shooting down our toy; they only outnumbered us maybe a hundred to one. If every one of our ambushes worked, we might cut it down to ninety to one.

  Gerin ground troops might be slow to arrive, but once they were there you had no doubt about it. Just out of range of our knucklek
nockers, the column paused and set up some tubing that had to be artillery of some sort. Sure enough; we heard a sort of warbling whoosh, and then a vast whump as the first shells burst over our heads and spat shards of steel down on us. After a couple or three shots, fairly well separated, they sent up a whole tanker load, and the concussion shuddered the hills themselves.

  We watched them advance through the smoke and haze of their initial barrage. They were in easy missile range, but we had to save the missiles for their air support. Everyone’s seen the news clips—that strange, undulating way they move. They may be true amphibians, but they’re clearly more at home in water or space than walking around on the ground. Not that it’s walking, really. Their weapons fire slower on automatic than ours, but they can carry two of them—an advantage of having all those extra appendages. And in close, hand-to-hand combat, their two metal-tipped tentacles are lethal.

  They came closer, advancing in little bobbing runs that were similar to our own tactics, but not the same. It’s hard to explain, but watching them come I felt how alien they were—they could not have been humans in alien suits, for instance. The very fact that I had trouble picking out the logic of their movements—why they chose to go this way up a draw, and not that—emphasized the differences.

  Now they were passing the first marker. Rolly tapped me on the shoulder, and I nodded. He hit the switch, and a storm cloud rolled under them, tumbling them in the explosion. Those in the first rank let off a burst, virtually unaimed; the smack of their slugs on the rocks was drowned in the roar and clatter of the explosion, and the dust of it rolled forward to hide them all. Chunks of rock splattered all around; a secondary roar had to mean that the blast had triggered a rockslide, just as we’d hoped. When the dust cleared a little, we couldn’t see any of the live ones, only a few wet messes just beyond a mound of broken stone and uprooted brush.

  One of the wetears down at the far end of the trench stood up to peer out. Before anyone could yank him back, Gerin slugs took his face and the back of his head, and he toppled over. Then a storm of fire rang along the rocks nearby while we all ducked. Stupid kid should have known they wouldn’t all be dead: we’d told them and told them. Our flyspy crew concentrated on their screens; at the moment the critter was reading infrared, and the enemy fire showed clearly. Garrond gave us the coordinates; our return fire got a few more (or so the flyspy showed—we didn’t stand up to see).

  But that was only the first wave. All too soon we could see the next Gerin working their way past the rockslide toward our positions. And although I’d been listening for it, I hadn’t heard an explosion from the other side of the strip. Had they been overrun, or had the Gerin failed to attempt an envelopment?

  Suddenly the sky was full of light and noise: the Gerin had launched another barrage. Oddly, the weapons seemed to be intended to cause noise as much as actual damage. And they were noisy: my ears rang painfully and I saw others shaking their heads. Under cover of that noise, Gerin leaped out, hardly ten meters away. Someone to my left screamed; their slugs slammed all around us. We fired back, and saw their protective suits ripple and split, their innards gushing out to stain the ground. But there were too many, and some of them made it to us, stabbing wildly with those metal-tipped tentacles. One of them smashed into Rolly’s chest; his eyes bulged, and pink froth erupted from his mouth. I fired point-blank at that one. It collapsed with a gasping wheeze, but it was too late for Rolly.

  Even in all the noise, I was aware that the Gerin themselves fought almost silently. I’d heard they had speech, of a sort—audible sounds, that is—but they didn’t yell at each other, or cry out when injured. It was almost like fighting machines. And like machines, they kept coming. Even in the dark.

  It was sometime in that first night when I heard the row between the captain and the major. I don’t know when it started, maybe in private before the Gerin even got to us, but in the noise of combat, they’d both raised their voices. I was going along, checking ammo levels, making sure everyone had water, and passed them just close enough to hear.

  “—You can’t do that,” Major Sewell was saying. “They said, hold the strip.”

  “Because it’s that bastard Ifleta’s,” said the captain. He’d figured it out too, of course; he didn’t turn stupid when he got his promotion. I should have gone on, but instead I hunkered down a little and listened. If he talked the major around, I’d need to know. “So no heavy artillery, no tactical nukes, no damage to his art collection or whatever he thinks it is. And it’s crazy.... Listen, the Gerin are amphibs, they even have swim tanks in their ships—”

  “So? Dammit, Carl, it’s the middle of a battle, not a lecture room—”

  “So they’re territorial.” I could hear the expletive he didn’t say at the end of that . . . Sewell was a senior officer, however dense. “It’s part of that honor stuff: where you are determines your role in the dominance hierarchy. If we move, we’re no threat; if we stay in one place they’ll attack—”

  “They are attacking, in case you hadn’t noticed, Captain. We’re dug in here; if we move they can take us easily. Or were you suggesting that we just run for it?” The contempt in Sewell’s voice was audible, even through the gunfire.

  The captain made one more try. I knew, from our years together, what it took for him to hold his temper at the major’s tone; the effort came through in his voice. “Sir, with all due respect, after the massacre on DuQuesne, there was a study of Gerin psychology in the Military Topics Review—and that study indicated that the Gerin would choose to assault stationary, defended positions over a force in movement. Something about defending certain rock formations in the tidal zone, important for amphibians—”

  “Yeah, well, what some egghead scientist thinks the Slime do and what the Slime out here in combat do are two different things. And our orders, Captain, say stand and defend this shuttle strip. It doesn’t matter a truckful of chickenshit whether the strip is Ifleta’s personal private hideaway or was built by the Gerin: I was told to defend it, and I’m going to defend it. Is that clear?”

  “Sir.” I heard boots scrape on the broken rock and got myself out of there in a hurry. Another time that I’d heard more than I should have, at least more than it would be comfortable to admit. Not long after, the captain met me as I worked my way back down the line. He leaned over and said in my ear, “I know you heard that, Gunny. Keep it to yourself. “

  “You got eyes in the dark?” I asked. It meant more than that; we’d used it as a code a long time ago. I didn’t think he’d choose that way, but I’d let him decide.

  “No,” he said. A shell burst nearby, deafening us both for a moment; I could see, in the brief glare, his unshaken determination. “No,” he said again after we could hear. “It’s too late anyway.”

  “Ifleta’s the owner?” I asked.

  “Yeah. Senior counselor—like a president—in Hamny’s Consortium, and boss of Sigma Combine. This is his little hideaway—should have been a colony, but he got here first. What I figure is this is his price for bringing Hamny’s in free: three human-settled worlds, two of ‘em industrial. Worth it, that’s one way of looking at it. Trade a couple thousand marines for three allied planets, populations to draft, industrial plants in place, and probably a good chunk of money as well.”

  I grunted, because there’s nothing to say to that kind of argument. Not in words, anyway. Then I asked, “Does the major know?”

  The captain shrugged. “You heard me—I told him. I told him yesterday, when they found the house. He doesn’t care. Rich man wants the aliens out of his property, that’s just fine—treat marines like mercs, he doesn’t give a damn, and that, Tinker, is what they call an officer and a gentleman. His father’s a retired admiral; he’s looking for stars of his own.” It was a measure of his resentment that he called me by that old nickname . . . the others that had used it were all dead. I wondered if he resented his own lost patrimony ...
the rich bottomland farm that would have been his, the wife and many children. He had been a farmer’s son, in a long line of farmers, as proud of their heritage as any admiral.

  “Best watch him, Captain,” I said, certain that I would. “He’s likely to use your advice all wrong.”

  “I know. He backstabbed Tio, got him shipped over to the Second with a bad rep—” He stopped suddenly, and his voice changed. “Well, Gunny, let me know how that number-three post is loaded.” I took that hint, and went on; we’d talked too long as it was.

  So now I knew the whole story—for one thing about Captain Carl Dietz, he never in his life made accusations without the information to back them up. He hadn’t accused me when it might have got him a lighter sentence, all those years ago. If he said it was Ifleta’s place, if he was sure that our losses bought Ifleta’s support, and three planets, then I was sure. I didn’t like it, but I believed it.

  The pressure was constant. We had no time to think, no time to rest, taking only the briefest catnaps one by one, with the others alert. We knew we were inflicting heavy losses, but the Gerin kept coming. Again and again, singly and in triads and larger groups, they appeared, struggling up the hills; firing steadily until they were cut down to ooze violet fluid on the scarred slopes. Our losses were less, but irreparable.

  It was dawn again—which dawn, how many days since landing, I wasn’t at all sure. I glanced at the rising sun, irrationally angry because it hurt my eyes. What I could see of the others looked as bad as I felt: filthy, stinking, their eyes sunken in drawn faces, dirty bandages on too many wounds. The line of motionless mounds behind our position was longer, again. No time for burial, no time to drag the dead farther away: they were here, with us, and they stank in their own way. We had covered their faces; that was all we could do.