Bridgehead

by David Drake

  Either the Vrage knew he had a single opponent, or he was operating as if that fact were true because he had no chance at all in a crossfire. By reversing he protected himself against that opponent and sent the vehicle back toward cover until more weight could be brought to bear.

  The car dodged behind one of the giant trees. Astor rose and sawed through the bole.

  It required a four-second burst, which meant the woman had to override all her training to accomplish what was necessary. She was no trembling neophyte to freeze on the trigger and chance cooking her gun when she needed it most.

  But right now she needed the tree. Its rigid cells were blasted away a handsbreadth to either side of the beam. The trunk was hollow, though here near the base something close to a third of the diameter was wood rather than weight-reducing void. Astor’s gun could slice steel armor, given the time. It tore sideways through the wood at a walking pace.

  Smoke and sparks spewed from the line of impact. They were virtually smothered by the steam into which thirty gallons of cellular fluid were flash-heated. Astor was aiming down at a slant. The earth spattered beyond the tree and blazed where it was mixed with enough organic material.

  There was no certainty as to how the tree would fall. A light breeze with the spike’s hundred feet of leverage could have toppled the whole mass back toward Astor. Worse, if it slipped sideways, the top could threaten Selve more imminently than did the Vrage soldiers who were searching for all of them. War is not a business which can be conducted without risk; and, in the event, the tree crashed down onto the low side of the cut, away from the Traveler.

  * * *

  The Vrage had equated “unseen” with “unthreatened.” He was broadcasting a call for support. This was not the magnetic anomaly the Vrage troop had been sent to investigate. The location signal from his car was the beacon to which his fellows were being summoned. The Vrage popped up his viewscreen and began to clamber out of the grounded vehicle with his weapon in his hand. The destruction of the two leading cars had shocked him. He knew that his opponent could even now be shifting for a clear field and the end of what the crackling ruin had started. At least on foot there was some chance to get off the first shot if he glimpsed a target through the curtains of foliage, through the play of wrong-colored light over and around his viewslit—

  The speed at which the tree was falling was understated because of the object’s size. The Vrage crouched in his vehicle’s shelter and scanned the undergrowth for lurking gunmen. When the tree became a motion rather than a barrier in the Vrage’s restricted vision, it was already far too late for him.

  If the bole’s speed had been in doubt, then its inertia was not. The ground hollowed, then rose as the tree bounced upward. Nervous ripples in the soil succeeded one another half a step ahead of the sky-filling crash. The undergrowth did not affect the giant as it seesawed back and forth on its ends to find equilibrium. The car did not affect it, either, except that chlorine from the flattened vehicle bleached a broad swatch of the outer bark.

  The Vrage’s death had even less effect on his environment: his suit lost all semblance of shape, like a squashed foil wrapper. The fluid which leaked through every flattened joint was a saturated copper-sulphate blue that pooled and darkened on the magenta armor.

  * * *

  Astor sprinted twenty feet. Then she flopped on her belly, half curled around the multiple stems of a clump of the prevalent undergrowth. She found she had fair visibility through the curtains of compound leaves brushing the forest floor. Good enough to see and respond to a flash of purple-red suit, at any rate.

  By staying low, Astor could avoid the wild blasts with which Vrage soldiers were even now slicing the vegetation—and likely one another, as the only sentients erect in the forest. They would come to seek her and seek an answer at this place where their fellow had summoned them and died.

  Astor hoped that Selve would not finish his business before she herself had the opportunity to greet the Vrages again.

  * * *

  The alien who confronted Arlene Myaschensky paused a yard from her. It looked uncannily like a huge spider in a posture of defense: four legs planted firmly on the ground, the other four lifted with the thorax toward a perceived threat.

  But Arlene was not the threat, was not a threat, as she knew and the alien must know.

  Its head was a flattened bubble on the human-sized torso. The only facial feature was the band which looked like six inches of electrician’s tape across the smooth magenta. That twisted a full 180 degrees away from the kneeling woman and back toward the vehicle from which the alien had stepped.

  Arlene coughed sharply, rendingly. The head’s arc of movement was that of a machine, not a living thing; but a machine’s internal workings would not require a chlorine atmosphere. She started to rise.

  The head spun back to a 0-degree, not 360-degree, attitude. Two hands with opposable thumbs but mittened fingers grasped her shoulders. The translucent disk now nodded very close to her. Although it was cold and no more outwardly threatening than a piece of shower stall, Myaschensky felt the object’s presence deep in the reptilian valleys of her mind.

  “If you move,” insisted the alien’s voice as he tugged her upright, “I’ll blow you away.” The incongruous words came from somewhere in or on the creature’s chest. Myaschensky recalled what Mike had said about the Travelers speaking the night before through apparatus seemingly woven into their orange suits. But this could not be Selve, could not be Astor or Keyliss, this spider-limbed thing which tried to pull her toward it.

  “If you move, I’ll blow you away!” the voice repeated. Context put a tone of anger and frustration into the words which were in reality mechanical. The alien could not really speak to her. It could only parrot that single phrase like a desperate tourist who needs a restroom but can only ask for directions to a hotel. Myaschensky realized that the distorted hands that clung to her were no stronger than a child’s. She tensed to slap the creature away in loathing as if it were a pawing wino.

  The alien gestured toward its vehicle—with its weapon.

  Arlene’s heart jumped. Her feet shuffled of their own accord, hindered rather than guided by the sprawl of limbs beneath the reddish-purple suit.

  A forest giant crashed lingeringly to the ground, somewhere close but hidden by the undergrowth through which burst Doctors Shroyer and Gustafson, close together and both looking over their shoulders toward the sound of the falling tree.

  The alien’s head rotated, and the weapon in his hand swept toward the newcomers. This time, the alien did not bother to voice a warning.

  The falling tree had beaten Shroyer and Gustafson from cover like quail, straight into the sights of the gunner.

  * * *

  Henry Layberg had seen death and persons brought back from it often enough to feel a certain scientific detachment even now. He reached for Keyliss’s crumpled gun as the only hard object in the landscape. The Vrage extended its own weapon with a quick assurance.

  A thumb-thick beam of fire hosed from the undergrowth and splashed on the sides of the floating vehicle.

  Astor was the only one of the Travelers who could be expected to do the right thing with a gun. Selve had been lucky enough to remember to focus his beam tight, however. He was less fortunate in his target. He had a fragmented but surprisingly good view at ankle level from the bower in which he furiously tried different parameters. When the fourth trial setting failed to get any more response than the three before it, Selve had grimaced and stared sidelong at nothing in particular. He could see Layberg and Keyliss sprawled. The swatches of magenta a few yards away made a fully understandable tableau.

  Astor—in Selve’s position—would have ignored what was about to happen. Selve could not ignore it. He snatched up his gun and ripped a long burst into the egg-shaped vehicle.

  The lance of fire became a cascade where it hit the armor. The edge of the lifted windscreen crazed and went milky where redirected energy washed it. Lay
berg’s outstretched arm flashed hot. Fine hairs curled on the back of his neck. The car continued to float without structural damage. The Vrage driver was untouched because of the angle of the shot. He leaped out of his vehicle, keeping its armored side between him and the Traveler’s gun.

  Selve could not have marked his own location better with a series of billboards. Foliage within a yard of his beam had shriveled and turned yellow. Because Selve had swept his burst down the length of the car, the yellow scar was an arrow with him at the apex. He had been trained to always shift position after firing. In the stress of an unexpected firefight, he instead hunched lower to the ground like a newborn fawn. His hands were mottled with their grip on his gun. His conscious mind prayed that he had done lethal damage to the Vrage. His subconscious screamed with the irrational certainty that he had not.

  The Vrage was a soldier, not a technician with a gun. He sidled to the back of his vehicle, looking more than ever like a crab. His own weapon was poised and his four legs flexed, ready to bounce him up for a shot.

  Henry Layberg rushed the Vrage from behind. He wasn’t sure why. He had once seen a street mugging without feeling an urge to intervene. This was a dream world, a never-never land where ordinary conduct did not apply. He gripped Keyliss’s ruined gun by the muzzle end as if it were a golf club.

  The Vrage soldier’s peripheral vision was as bad as that of a man wearing a mask. His sense of touch was still inhumanly good through his protective suit, however. He felt the impact of Layberg’s first stride. He was turning back and dodging even before the doctor’s foot hit the ground the second time.

  Layberg swung in desperation. His gunstock missed the alien and even the weapon the alien was whirling to train on him. The clubbed gun smashed into and through the side of the car. Parts shorted explosively.

  The magenta armor was atmosphere tight and could have turned the fire of the three Travelers’ shoulder weapons in unison. Its mechanical strength was more on the order of plate glass, however. Layberg’s follow-through carried him sprawling into the car because it shattered so easily under his blow. The Vrage gun screamed a line of dissolution over the doctor.

  Something within the car burped. A section of sheathing ruptured from the inside and splashed itself across the alien’s suit. The Vrage leaped backward like a cat from a hotplate.

  Selve had steadied his nerves and his breathing. His first blast had cleared a field of fire even as it marked him. Now he squeezed off a half-second burst that would have made Astor feel proud. Chlorine and chlorine compounds puffed as the Vrage shrank around the hole in its torso.

  Henry Layberg pushed himself upright. The side of the vehicle felt warm. When he tugged at Keyliss’s weapon he found that it was already fused immovably into whatever was going on in the guts of the car. The Vrage curled up like a spider touched by a candle flame.

  Layberg turned and looked down the yellow wedge through the undergrowth. Selve stared back at him over his gunsights. The muzzle was cherry red and made the air dance above it.

  “Get the hell out of here!” the doctor yelled in fury. The pointing arrow was as obvious as a retractor in an abdominal X-ray. “Get out of here, and for God’s sake get us out!”

  * * *

  Shroyer and Gustafson gaped at the Vrage swinging its beam weapon to cut them apart. Arlene Myaschensky reacted as if the weapon lifting away from her head were a key turning to unlock her own personality. She lunged. The alien’s hands on her shoulders were pressures, not restraints. She caught the Vrage’s gun arm before it bore and jerked it down just as the weapon fired.

  The scream of the Vrage weapon was geometrically worse than anything else the woman had heard in her life. The purple beam zigzagged its line of destruction across the ground and undergrowth. Stems and leaves flopped away with no sign of burning or violence.

  Arlene ignored the swath of destruction because the noise was driving her literally insane. She flailed with the arm she held as if it were a club to kill a snake. Instead of shouting to the men for help, she was crying, “Shut up, shut up, shut up!” to nothing in particular.

  Shroyer and Gustafson could not hear her, but they stumbled to her aid anyway as soon as their minds cataloged the situation.

  The Vrage was not as strong as Myaschensky alone and not nearly as strong as it was frightening. Its legs were as flexible as its arms, however, and the permutations of all eight limbs in a brawl were startling.

  Two of the Vrage’s hands were locked in Arlene’s long hair, attempting to twist her head back. As Louis Gustafson awkwardly tried to pry one of those hands loose, a magenta leg kicked him off-balance and Myaschensky’s struggles slammed the Vrage weapon down on the old professor’s forehead. Gustafson sat down on the forest floor, his mouth opening and closing.

  The spinning, shrieking weapon bounced from the hand from which no amount of simple shaking had been able to fling it. The relative hush was so sudden that the woman’s shouts cut off in midsyllable also. Collops had been lopped from the trees while the weapon waved in wild figures. Chunks still falling from high up sounded like whispers in a cathedral.

  Robert Shroyer flung himself onto the Vrage a moment after the weapon ceased to be a factor. The chairman’s hesitation had not been cowardice so much as an unwillingness to alter the situation before he was clear as to the factors involved. He grasped two handsful of the suit and used his weight against those fulcrums. The Vrage had managed to stay upright against Myaschensky’s tugging. Now all three went down, the alien more or less beneath the two humans.

  Professor Gustafson blinked and touched his forehead. He lowered his hand and blinked again at the blood on his fingertips. There seemed to be no room for him in the thrashing brawl, but he started to get up to rejoin it anyway. The forest rotated. Gustafson blinked and sat down again hard. Beneath his right hand was the Vrage weapon. The professor began to examine the artifact with the care he would have offered to any other unfamiliar tool.

  Arlene Myaschensky had moved in something approaching a trance from the moment the first of the herbivores had lurched into her awareness. The cessation of the gun’s chalk-grating scream had brought back her intellectual control. The earlier hysteria had been useful, just as were the rages of tenth-century berserkers. Full awareness meant that Arlene’s hands ached with their death-grip on the Vrage. Her scalp felt as if square inches of it were being tugged loose as Chairman Shroyer made the mistake of trying to pull free one of the alien’s hands. It was a well-meant action, but it only added to the agony which was already scarcely bearable. Arlene shrieked.

  Shroyer jerked instead with his other hand, the one which gripped the flexible surface of the alien’s hood. The viewslit was stiffer than the armor proper and provided something of a handhold. The black slit came away and peeled the hood back as well. The suit lost its buoyant flexibility and molded itself to the Vrage like skin over a mummy’s bones. There was a puff of gas from the sudden opening. Shroyer sneezed and coughed. In a tinny voice he blurted, “Watch it! Watch it!” and tried to pull Myaschensky away from the danger.

  The Vrage’s mittened hands opened when his suit did. All eight of his limbs flailed like those of a drowning man. Arlene was already rolling free, eyes shut and hands clutching her scalp as if to squeeze it back in place. There had been no real damage, but the whole right side of her head felt as if it were soaked in molten lead. Pain, not the chairman’s warning, kept the woman from inhaling the poison that dissipated around her.

  Robert Shroyer backed a step before he caught his balance. He was still holding the swatch of hood in his hand. The material had a metallic slickness when gripped on the outer surface. The inner side of the fabric was a drab brown. Hanging free as it was, the whole piece waggled like so much linen.

  Gustafson, barely aware of what had gone on a few feet away from him, was immersed in his study of the Vrage weapon. His physical equilibrium had returned sufficiently that he could have moved if he had to do so; but there was no need for it so
long as Robert and Mrs. Myaschensky were all right.

  The Vrage had hands, so the weapon had a handgrip scarcely distinguishable from that of a human pistol or electric drill. The grip was a trifle small, even though Gustafson’s own hand was by no means large. The professor did not actually wrap his hand around the slanting grip but used two fingers of his left hand to position the grip close to his right palm. The translucent disk which seemed to provide the driving force was connected to the grip by a wand fifty—Gustafson used his index finger as a ruler; long experience made each wrinkle, even blurred by bad vision, a known distance—two millimeters long. The whole unit seemed to be one piece, so perhaps the disk only appeared to rotate.

  There was no trigger or button of comparable function, either. Gustafson touched the cool, porous-feeling surface gingerly.

  “What are these?” Arlene Myaschensky asked in a weak voice. She stood up, continuing to rub the top of her head with one hand. She gestured toward but not quite to the Vrage with a foot.

  “Good God,” muttered Robert Shroyer. He knelt again beside the creature he had been fighting. The sharpness of chlorine was all about them, though it had been diluted into an odor no more dangerous than an overtreated swimming pool. Shroyer took a handkerchief from his pocket to cover his mouth and nose. It gave him the appearance of a man about to vomit. In fact, he did feel a little queasy, what with the exertion, the gas, and …

  The vision slit had been deceptive. The alien had separate eyes, not the single broad organ Arlene’s nervous imagination had placed beneath the black bar. There were six eyes, blazing iridescently in death, set in point-down triads on the Vrage’s yellow face.

  “It was going to carry me off!” Myaschensky said. The two men glanced up at her in concern, but there was no need to worry. Arlene found real humor in the thoughts that danced through her mind, the fat ugly duckling and the eight-legged monster. She had years of practice in laughing at the first, so it did not require madness to make the other a joke as well. She smoothed her corduroys over her hips with both palms. The cloth had come through the struggle unaffected. Her sweater’s right sleeve had separated on the underarm, however, and the heavy camera had been twisted around to hang against her back.