Death World (Undying Mercenaries Series Book 5) (16 page)

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About five minutes after I left Winslade to continue Claver’s interrogation, I found myself manning a trench line we’d hastily dug with the aid of our “pigs.”

Pigs were huge walking drones that buzzed and revved. They were still digging, carving up the soft dark loam of the forest floor into curling rolls of dirt. Using something on the front of the machines that looked like a plowshare, the earth was gouged and thrown up in the direction of the wild forest.

The hole behind me was over a meter deep. The dirt pile on the forest side formed a handy barrier we could rest our rifles on. Already the pigs had dug a double-ringed defensive earthwork that encircled the lifter that rested on its struts in the middle.

I didn’t think our dug-in defenses were going to do us much good against the giant aliens, however. Unlike the techs driving the drones and most of our officers, I’d actually seen and done battle with one of these giants. I knew they would step right over these trench-lines—or worse, step down into them, crushing us.

So far, the pod creatures had yet to show themselves. My helmet-based tactical display indicated they were out there, but I couldn’t see them yet due to what might be called “undergrowth” in this forest of immense proportions. Fern-like plants ten meters high were everywhere, blocking my vision and generally getting in the way.

“How is this even possible?” Carlos demanded of no one in particular. He’d been revived by the time we returned to the lifter, before Winslade and I had commandeered the machine that doled out life in order to revive Claver.

Fresh from a violent death, Carlos’ voice seemed less confident than usual.

“How’s
what
possible, Specialist?” I asked.

“How can these tree-aliens move at all? I mean, they’re just plants, right? They haven’t got any muscles! I don’t get it.”

Kivi spoke up right away. “You took xenobiology,” she said. “Were you paying any attention? Our pigs don’t have muscles either, but they can also move. Those machines back on Gamma Pavonis moved very quickly too.”

“Yeah, but these things are freaking trees. It’s not the same.”

He had a point, and I didn’t have an answer. Natasha came to my rescue.

“I’ve been running tests on the samples I took,” she said. “We don’t know everything yet, but as far as I can tell, they have something like nanotubes inside their tough exterior. You saw that material that looked like corn silk, right? That stuff contracts when stimulated. Each strand works like a thin muscle. Each of the thousands of string-like hairs are attached to two spots inside the tube-like outer structure. Working together, they cause the creatures to move.”

“You’re talking about nanotubes inside the trunk, right?” Carlos asked.

“The trunk and the limbs. They’re the same. Those arms that look like branches to us are really tubes of flexible cellulose. Think about them as tough rubber hoses filled with strands of nano-fiber. It’s a marvelous system whether it was designed, or it evolved naturally.”

Her last comment sparked my interest. “You still think these things might be bio-engineered?”

“It’s possible,” she said. “We just don’t know enough yet.”

“Well,” I said, sighting along my rifle barrel, “I think we’re about to get schooled.”

There was a distant movement, a shivering of the tallest ferns to the south. I focused on that region as it was directly ahead and part of our designated firing zone.

“They’re creeping up on us,” Carlos said suddenly.

There was a certainty in his voice that got my attention.

“Do you see something, Specialist?”

He never got the chance to answer. At that moment, Natasha reported in, updating my tactical screen. The techs had sent out a skirmish-line of buzzers into the deep forest to watch for trouble. She relayed the live feed to her commanders—including me.

Sure enough, the tree things were advancing toward us on all fours. They lit up on my helmet’s tactical display with red arrows pointing down to their tracked positions. I did a quick count. There were about twenty contacts coming toward our unit’s portion of the defensive line. There had to be more than a hundred circling the entire camp.

“Hold your fire until they break into the open,” I said. “We want to hit them hard and all at once. If they come in a little closer, they won’t be able to turn around and run.”

“I don’t like this,” Kivi said, breathing hard over her microphone. “They’re intelligent. The one that we killed didn’t seem too smart—but this behavior, these things are coordinating. I don’t think they’re simple animals.”

“Agreed,” Natasha said. “They’re clearly intelligent beyond the animal level. As to the behavior of the first one, remember it was a newborn. How smart were you thirty seconds after birth?”

They both had made good points, and I didn’t like any of them. I’d hoped the enemy would be as dumb as the trees they resembled. The mere fact that creatures made of cellulose were creeping up on us as an organized group was, well,
creepy
. How did they communicate? Who was leading them?

I gave my head a little shake to get back into the game. The here and now was all that mattered. There wasn’t time to have a scientific debate about the enemy. All we could do was wait for their charge.

They didn’t take long to begin the attack. Almost as one, they rose up above the ferns they’d been hiding behind. I heard a ripping roar of gunfire as hundreds of soldiers opened up all around us. We were blazing away like there was no tomorrow—and with only one lifter and one revival machine, we might be right.

Thousands of tracing rounds leapt through the air from the squads around us. My reticle lit up indicating I was on target, and my team joined in.

The monsters were lumbering toward us. They were a little slow at first because they had to stand up from a hunched position and get their big legs moving.

The ten meter tall ferns of the forest came to the curved knees of the tree-creatures. I hadn’t really noticed before, but now that Natasha had explained they were boneless shells full of thousands of strand-like muscles, I could see they didn’t have joints. Their knees flexed in a curve rather than bending sharply in the middle. The effect was strange to witness, but it was also undeniably effective. They came at us at an alarming pace, tearing the ferns apart and brushing them aside. A combined warbling howl began as the charge became widespread. All of the creatures seemed to be letting loose at once. The sound could only be described as a battle cry.

Just one of these things could give you a headache, but a hundred of them? I wasn’t sure my eardrums would survive it. Men put their hands to their helmets and shouted in pain, but the monsters were making so much racket that our own screams couldn’t be heard. Our rate of fire slackened until it almost died out.

Fortunately, the aliens didn’t keep the howling up for long. They were moving faster now, orange fleshy fronds bouncing like leaves all over their strange bodies. Giant ferns whipped at those lanky, striding legs. I even saw several of them leap, soaring over gigantic roots.

Our small-arms fire wasn’t doing much. We fired into their mass but weren’t bringing anybody down.

“Sargon, burn the closest one. Squad, all follow his target. Everyone hit the one that he lights up—hit it hard!”

At first, our automatic fire slowed. Then when Sargon nailed the leader, we all lashed it with a storm of bullets, knocking it from its feet. It went down hard, thrashing and rolling. The next two monsters behind went down as well, tripped by the fallen leader.

“Focus on those three. Mark your targets. Follow my lead.”

I engaged a tactical option in my helmet’s battle system I’d never had cause to use before in infantry gear. The option made the arrow over the head of my target blink rapidly.

That got my whole squad to target the same alien. We hadn’t fought too many monsters that were so big we needed to use the system, but we needed it now. I’d used it before to coordinate fire on the biggest machines on Machine World, but I’d been driving a dragon then—and I wished I was driving a dragon right now. I’d have felt a lot safer.

We’d only brought down six by the time they hit our line. My whole unit, facing twenty of the enemy, was overrun. Graves came on the channel, giving us all direct orders in the final seconds before they hit us.

“Duck down when they step over you,” he said in a remarkably calm voice. “Lie down in the trench. That way you’ll probably avoid being crushed. When they stop the charge, do battle by squads with the nearest enemy. Fire at will.”

The battle went into slow-motion for me after that. It was like I was living at a different pace. My heart was pounding, and my lungs were burning with rapid, panting breaths.

I fell on my back when the enemy hit our front trench line. A wave of dirt splattered my faceplate, obscuring my vision, but I was able to see the foot that had landed not five feet from me.

Someone in the line hadn’t been so lucky—it was Natasha. A giant had stepped right on her, crushing her down with terrific force.

I let rip with my rifle, shooting the alien right in the crotch, but that only lasted for a split-second before it was gone. A few drops of milky fluid dribbled from the creature onto my armor, smoking white as the acid burned the metal.

Scrambling on all fours to Natasha, I was able to haul her out of the dirt. She was buried and helpless inside a huge footprint, but she was still alive. The earth and her armor had kept her from being crushed to death, but she had been pinned down. After freeing her, I turned back to the enemy.

They ended their charge as I watched. We were in the first trench not the second one, but this time we’d actually gotten the better end of the deal. The monsters that had overrun us stumbled to a halt. Some of them actually bumped into the hull of the lifter as a man might push off on a wall after a hard run. They doubled back and began going to work on the humans inside the inner circle of trenches.

Methodically, the aliens dug soldiers out of their shallow, scraped holes. All at once, I knew how gophers in a field must have felt when their homes were being stomped out of existence by a pack of grinning farm boys.

Fortunately, these “gophers” had teeth that could reach up to bite an enemy at range. I lit up a new target, the one I’d shot in the groin. Everyone who was able to fight blazed at it until it fell, thrashing. A flopping infantryman was in its hands, looking like a toy. Even though we took it down with concentrated, close-range fire, it had time to crush the man’s helmet with its massive jaws. The headless body was then cast away, twirling end over end until it crashed down onto the upper hull of the lifter and lay there motionless.

“Unit,” Graves said, still sounding like he was officiating at some kind of picnic, “I’ve been informed that the lifter crew is about to employ anti-personnel weaponry. Take cover—
now
.”

For a moment, my mind froze over. Then I remembered what he was talking about. Our lifters had new equipment: anti-personnel turrets. Essentially, these weapons systems were pulse-lasers on rotating mounts. The weapons had been added after our troubles on Machine World. I’d been briefed on them, but I’d never seen them in action.

Looking over the scene, I thought it might be disastrous to employ such a tool now. We had every soldier left alive in the legion out here defending the line. The automated turrets didn’t always know friend from foe, as I recalled. If they had a target, they fired, regardless of who might be behind that target or even in-between the target and the turret.

“Take cover!” I shouted to my squad, throwing myself into the trench again.

Others tried to follow me, but it wasn’t easy for all of us to fit. The soft dirt of our trenches had been greatly disrupted. Much of the trench line had been filled in by the tread of multi-ton monsters as they charged over us.

Gazing out of my thin line of cover, I realized why the lifter people were panicking. The creatures were all over the ship, tearing at it. Metal chunks had already been ripped from the hull. In their combined fury and strength, they’d managed to shift the entire lifter, and it now stood at a cant of perhaps five or ten degrees. All around the perimeter of the transport, more and more aliens were rushing up, joining their frenzied comrades. They were about to tip the ship up and over.

The turrets rolled out of protective clamshells. Visually, the effect was like that of a large animal opening eyes that had been tightly clamped shut. There were five or six turrets within my field of view—too many for my comfort.

When the turrets began to fire, things got worse. As far as I could tell, they were killing men as often as aliens. For every monster that was lit up and blown apart, at least one of our own troops died in the flashing spillover.

Scrambling on all fours, I crawled up against the body of an alien and took refuge there. As I moved, I felt something catch my foot. I pulled hard and quickly broke free.

Dragging myself, sides heaving, I fell back against the trunk of the dying alien. It was still shivering with those fronds it had on its trunk twitching and squirming like dying snakes. But it provided shelter for me with its body.

Two of my troopers joined me in short order. One was Carlos, the other was Kivi.