The going for everyone was uncertain. Slip, slide, squish in mud. Tufts of turf tried to trip the unwary. Tangles of tendrils and trailing vines lay in wait to entrap careless feet. Droopy leaves, twigs, and mossy growths hung in lank sheets to block vision. Streams that moved sluggishly were everywhere, so murky with decaying and decayed matter that the sinkholes on their bottoms couldn't be seen or even felt until stepped into. Small water-dwelling parasites struggled to get through the material of the Marines' uniforms. And there were all those damn insectoids that hadn't yet gotten the word.
Only the flying insectoids thought "banquet" and buzzed and flitted in to dine. It wasn't long before nearly every Marine in the battalion had multiple itching bites from beasties that had managed to get inside his chameleon uniform.
On the right front corner, Schultz ignored the three bites he sustained. He'd been inoculated against all known pathogens, and some itching was simply part of being in the field. His attention remained firmly fixed on his surroundings. Two men back, Corporal Kerr also ignored the itching. Miscellaneous bites were nothing to be concerned with, not unless they infected, and he'd had the same inoculations Schultz had. He was as alert as Schultz, but not all his attention was on his surroundings. As a fire team leader, he had to be fully aware of his men. Normally he would have positioned himself between them, but not this time. He knew Schultz could handle himself and not make mistakes; Corporal Doyle was another matter. Kerr knew he needed to give him close supervision. He used his infra shield more often than he usually would so he could maintain visual contact with Doyle. His eyes constantly flicked to the HUD display he had tacked in the corner of the shield so he could see where Doyle was when he wasn't using his infra.
A lone flitterer wended its way under the chin of Corporal Doyle's helmet and inside the neck of his chameleon shirt to his collarbone, where it settled down to drill a well into the succulent juices of this odd flesh. The juices it siphoned up were just as odd as the flesh, much odder than the flitterer had suspected, and it promptly withdrew its proboscis. Disoriented by the alien nutrients, which were anything but nutritious for it, it wandered about aimlessly for a bit, unable to find its way back out until Doyle slapped his chest and squished it.
Several minutes afterward, between the excruciating itch on his collarbone and horrible thoughts of what that alien insectal ichor must be doing to his tender and all-too-human flesh, Doyle was half driven to distraction and felt himself headed for madness. He forgot to watch where he was stepping and slid, almost fell, when something slipped under his foot.
"Watch your step, Doyle," Kerr's soft voice came to him. "Use your light shield."
"Uh, right," Doyle replied as he regained his balance. He stopped using his infra shield and stayed with the light-gatherer shield so he could see where he was going. He held his blaster by the forestock with his left hand while he scratched at his collarbone and scrubbed at his chest with his right; between his shirt and glove, it was an ineffectual scratching.
The battalion advanced slowly. Some of the slowness was due to the difficulty of movement. Some was in order to maintain formation. The part of the Marines' minds that was aware of the slowness thought it was because of the caution the pointmen and the men on the flanks needed to maintain. The pace was less than a kilometer in a local hour. Such a pace over difficult terrain was exhausting. In the battalion's right front corner, after two hours, Corporal Kerr was running with sweat. He was tired and found his attention wandering. He focused on Doyle and forced himself back to alertness. Doyle was drenched and nearly out of it altogether. He was vaguely aware that he was losing body fluids far faster than he was taking in water. It took everything he had merely to maintain contact with Schultz and find his footing. Schultz was covered with a sheen of perspiration, but his attention and alertness hadn't varied from the sharpness he started out with.
A little more than two kilometers from their starting point, Schultz stopped and lowered himself to one knee. In waves from him, the battalion racheted to a stop.
"What do you have, Hammer?" Kerr asked.
Schultz grunted. What he had was a feeling, an impression. There wasn't a single thing to which he could point and say, "Danger." Not a dimly seen form, not a print in the mud or a newly snapped twig. Not even a fleeting scent or an unexplained sound.
A moment later Gunnery Sergeant Charlie Bass came forward to check out the situation.
"What?" he asked.
Schultz was silent for a few seconds as he continued to study the landscape to his front and his right, wondering how—or whether—to answer the question.
"Skinks," he finally said.
"Where?"
Invisible under his chameleons, Schultz shook his head. "Out there," he murmured.
"Did you see anything? Hear anything?"
Schultz grunted a negative.
"UPUD doesn't show anything, Gunny," Lance Corporal Dupont said.
Bass snarled at him. He didn't want to hear what the UPUD did or did not show. He considered what to say. All reports he'd heard or read said they were up against human rebels. There were no indications they were faced by the fierce, alien beings third platoon had encountered on Waygone. Of course, there were those unexplainable weapons. But the Skinks hadn't used anything like them. Still...
"If they aren't here, let's move out and find them," Bass finally said. There, he hadn't reprimanded Schultz for invoking a boogeyman nobody else believed in, nor had he even acknowledged the man's belief. In his infra, Schultz rose to his feet and moved forward.
As Bass waited for his position in the platoon column to reach him, he toggled his comm to the company command circuit and reported to Lieutenant Humphrey. Humphrey agreed that he'd done the right thing, and then made his own report to Battalion. Commander van Winkle told him to make sure everybody was alert, then reported to FIST. Brigadier Sturgeon knew about Schultz's belief that they were up against the Skinks. He was able to follow Schultz's thinking to that conclusion without having to agree with it. On the other hand, the weapon that had killed two of his Raptors and a Dragon wasn't in any human armory he'd ever heard of. So maybe they were up against aliens. Elements of his command had encountered nonhuman sentiences twice over the past couple of years, so hostile aliens were possible. And any belief that helped his Marines stay alert and alive was all right with him.
When Bass talked with Schultz, he used the circuit that allowed the entire platoon to listen without anyone else being able to break in. Corporal Doyle listened closely. His fatigue vanished, his sweat dried up, his sphincters tightened, and so much adrenaline pumped into his system that a touch would have made him twang like a guitar string. Marines from a war centuries past might have described it as "His pucker factor pegged the meter."
Skinks? Doyle would have said the word out loud if his throat wasn't so tight it wouldn't even let a squeak through. He hadn't been on the mission to Society 437, the planet commonly called Waygone, but once the secret was out, he'd certainly heard about it. Skinks! He'd heard about them. Lots. If he were more imaginative, they would have haunted his dreams. Skinks! Such a mild name for ferocious creatures. In his imagination they were more than two and a half meters tall, weighed 250 kilos, spat fire, exhaled corrosion, ate living flesh, breathed water as well as air, and could see chameleoned Marines.
He was partly right. Some of the Skinks were more than two meters tall and weighed more than two hundred kilos. They did breathe water as well as air. They didn't exhale corrosion, though—but they used weapons that shot corrosive acid. As for the rest of it? Doyle's imagination was rich enough to have brought on nightmares.
Suddenly the swamp looked different to Corporal Doyle. Suddenly every shadow held a gigantic, fire-breathing, corrosion exhaling, human-flesh-eating monster that not only could see him, but wanted to kill him. Every cry from a swamp creature was the death rattle of a Marine dying horribly from an encounter with a Skink. Every ripple on the surface of a stream became the trail of a w
ater breather coming to roast him and dissolve his charred remains. Every movement seen in the corner of his eyes was a charging Skink bent on his oblivion.
Doyle's blood pressure rose to forehead-tightening level. His throat constricted until breath couldn't get through to his lungs.
"Get a grip, Doyle," Kerr's voice came over the helmet comm.
Doyle jumped, and his sphincter gave critical ground. "Ah, shit!" he croaked through a throat that also eased.
"Smells like it," Kerr agreed. "Next stream we cross, clean yourself."
Partly disrobe in a stream where Skinks swarmed at him? Was Corporal Kerr crazy?
Unlike Doyle, Kerr had been on Waygone and he had fought the Skinks. He knew firsthand how ferocious they were. He also knew their weapons were short-range. A lone Marine with a blaster could take out a lot of Skinks before they got close enough to use their acid-shooting weapons. Unfortunately, the sight lines in the swamp were short enough that the Skinks would be within range before the Marines could see them. Fortunately, the Marines weren't looking for Skinks, they were hunting rebels. There was no evidence of any alien sentience on Kingdom. Except for whatever it was that killed two Raptors and a Dragon—and Schultz's conviction that the Skinks were here.
Schultz, almost preternaturally alert to begin with, became more so, if such a thing was possible. Against a human foe he was imperturbable. He understood humans and the way humans fought. He was a Marine, and he knew the Confederation Marines were the best warriors in the history of mankind. More, he knew that he was among the very best fighters the Marine Corps had. But the Skinks...
He thought the Skinks were alien. They didn't live and fight with the same imperatives humans did. Their base, genetic motives were somehow different. He didn't know in what way they were different, or why they were different. But he remembered the fanaticism with which they'd fought on Waygone, and their fanaticism had combined with their overconfidence and small numbers to allow a lone Marine platoon to defeat them.
The Skinks were on Kingdom in such large numbers that the local armed forces were being slaughtered, along with large numbers of civilians—Schultz lifted his shields and spat; only the most vile soldiers slaughter civilians—and the Confederation had to intervene. To Schultz, the only way to deal with Skinks was to nuke the entire planet, make it uninhabitable. One Marine FIST wasn't enough to defeat them.
Schultz repressed a shiver. He'd been in tight situations before, fights in which many Marines had died. There had even been a few battles he hadn't expected to survive. But he didn't believe he'd ever been in as deadly a position as he was in just then. He thought they were all going to die.
Chapter Twelve
"Amen," pronounced Increase Harmony, the obligatory benediction completed. He raised his head to the others gathered about the conference table. "The City of God shall prevail," he added.
"God's will," the six men intoned as one.
"We are as merry as men bound for heaven." Harmony smiled.
"That we are, Brother Harmony," Chajim Nishmath agreed, stroking his long white beard thoughtfully. "Brothers," he said, addressing the others, "we have important business to discuss this day and time is perilously short."
The seven men gathered in conference were the leading ministers of the City of God sect. A neo-Puritan movement, the City of God rejected a formal church structure. Each individual congregation or "meeting" was totally independent of the others that loosely composed the sect. Each meeting had its minister, who provided the congregation with spiritual guidance and leadership in formal gatherings for worship, but his tenure was subject to the approval of the congregation and he could be removed by a vote.
The career of a successful minister in a City of God meeting had to be highly political as well as theologically sound—the City of God based its creed strictly upon the literal interpretation of the Authorized Version of the Bible, widely known as the King James Version. Each congregant knew his Bible well from an early age, and any deviation from its teachings on the part of any minister or other congregant was fuel for scandal.
The members of the City of God sect were dour, hardworking, no-nonsense people. They observed no church holidays, dressed plainly always, and, aside from singing psalms, eschewed churchly music of any kind. The City of God was only a minor sect among the many sectarian movements that made up the political life on the Kingdom of Yahweh and His Saints and Their Apostles, but in times of crisis its members were capable of incredible sacrifice and solidarity, and therefore it had survived from the earliest days of settlement on Kingdom.
The seven men around the table were the ministers of large congregations, and they had been leading their flocks successfully for years. As long as they lived and preached, their church would continue to thrive. They would allow nothing to interfere with that. They were survivors. And it was a time for surviving.
"When the Convocation meets tomorrow, we shall remain silent," Jacob Zebulon reminded them. "We shall sit and listen and bide our time, and in the fullness of time the will of the Lord shall be apparent to the Ecumenical Leaders."
The Ecumenical Leaders of Kingdom's sects were meeting the next day in Convocation at Mount Temple to consider the present crisis. The seven ministers would represent the City of God at the Convocation. Mount Temple was a holy place to all the sects on Kingdom, a neutral spot where they could put aside their differences and meet to solve common problems.
"They consider Mount Temple a place free of Satan," Canon Barjona sneered, "but when the sects gather there it is nothing but a temple of the devil!" The others murmured their assent. "I feel unclean even thinking about the apostates who'll be gathered there tomorrow."
"We must be there, brothers," Harmony sighed. "I have discussed with you before my Particular Faith, brothers, that this Convocation will be most significant to the future of our church." A Particular Faith, a carryover from the early days of Puritanism, was a divinely inspired intimation sent to men by God's angels to show them the Way.
"We too have had them, Brother Increase," Elnathan Jones said. "It does not surprise me that the Hand of God has descended upon our elite and opened our eyes to the machinations of Satan and his minions."
"Brothers," Jacob Zebulon intoned, "are the People ready? Are they ready, as the Jews of old, to flee Egypt into the Wilderness?"
"Aye, when the Convocation is concluded, we shall be ready, brother," the others responded. Before the Cambria was destroyed and vengeance could descend upon them, the entire congregations of the City of God would be long gone into the wildernesses of Kingdom, to refuges in the vast wastelands of the planet, there to weather the storm that was sure to descend upon them as soon as the news was out that the ship had been destroyed by their men.
"We are going to show them all a thing or two," Eliashub Williams rumbled.
"That we are, Brother Williams! That we are!" Harmony said. "Only the Confederation, in league with the Convocation, could be responsible for these depredations, and you all know, brothers, that the purpose of these incursions is to set Confederation troops among us to destroy us! Well," he shook his fist in direction of Haven, where the sanctuary of Mount Temple was located, "the scales shall be dropped from their eyes and they shall see the truth."
"They'll see it, all right, from every hemisphere on the planet Earth." Williams chuckled.
"Brothers, before we depart here for Mount Temple, let us pray for the souls of our brave brethren who will show the light to the people of Earth. They should already be aboard the Cambria and en route to glory."
The seven men bowed their heads and began to recite the Twenty-third Psalm of David.
Bishop Ralphy Bruce Preachintent drummed his fingers impatiently on the tabletop.
"Brother Ralphy Bruce, would you please stop that?" Chairman Shammar asked. Bishop Preachintent had been last year's chairman of the Convocation of Ecumenical Leaders. This year it was the turn of the leader of Kingdom's largest Muslim sect, Ayatollah Jebel Shammar.
Ralphy Bruce was included in the select company seated around the conference table because he was the spiritual leader of Kingdom's largest evangelical sect. The other three holy men—Swami Nirmal Bastar, Cardinal Leemus O'Lanners, and the Venerable Muong Bo—represented the largest Hindu, Catholic, and Buddhist sects respectively. Together the five men were the spiritual leaders of three-fifths of Kingdom's population, and since Kingdom was a theocracy, they were also the five most powerful political figures on the planet.
"Need I remind anyone that tomorrow begins the Convocation of Ecumenical Leaders? We must decide now on the strategy we wish to pursue in this time of crisis," Shammar told the others, but he looked straight at Bishop Preachintent as he spoke.
"It is not the dissidents who are responsible for the destruction that has been visited upon us," the Venerable Muong Bo said. "They have neither the forces nor the organization to defeat the Army of God."
"You are right, Venerable," Ayatollah Shammar responded. "It has to be the Confederation itself, brothers."
"Yes, and their goal is the subjugation of our world and the destruction of our sacred beliefs and practices!" Swami Bastar almost shouted. Of all the sects on Kingdom, Bastar's was the most controversial, mainly because it adamantly refused to abandon the ancient practices of its ancestors, which included the immolation of wives on their husbands' funeral pyres.
"Has anyone considered," Ralphy Bruce began, his voice deceptively calm, "that possibly, just possibly, what is happening might be due TO THE WRATH OF A VENGEFUL GOD AS AN EXAMPLE TO US SINNERS?" He shouted the last words at the top of his voice.
The Venerable Muong Bo winced. "No," he responded.
"You are beginning to sound like a minister of the City of God, dear brother Ralphy Bruce." Swami Bastar smiled.
"Hmpf. Well. I just meant that is a possibility, my friends!" Preachintent went back to drumming his fingers on the tabletop.
"Brothers," began Cardinal Leemus O'Lanners, leader of the ultraconservative breakaway Catholic sect known as the Fathers of Padua, "in my Father's house there are many mansions." The others raised their eyebrows slightly. Cardinal O'Lanners was not known for the clarity of his sermons, which were mostly in Latin anyway, the official language of the Fathers. But he was a magnificent specimen of a churchman, in his bright red robes and with his huge patrician nose.
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