Glory Main (15 page)

“What's that?” Cranther's voice was far away.

“I mean, how do you know the specifics if you walked over the hill a week before all that happened?”

“Oh, they tried to court-­martial me for getting those guys killed. I was in the brig for an entire month. That was a bad scene; the two other guys who'd been with me had both gotten killed, so I was a sitting duck for this general and his Golden Child. You see, Command normally doesn't care about what happens to one platoon, except this one had somebody else's Golden Child in it and whoever that was, he wanted his pound of flesh.”

“How'd you get off the hook?”

“Pure luck. That captain had told the dead platoon leader that he'd personally sent a recon drone over the hill just that morning and that there wasn't anything there. Lucky for me, there was a recording of that message. He was required to send that drone because my team's intel was so outdated, but he just decided not to for some reason. Wanted to get to the galley while they were still serving chow, maybe. Or maybe he was just tired. Anyway, that tape ended the whole thing. When they let me out of the brig, one of the lawyers said that captain had been executed.

“Not real sure about that, though. The Golden Children have a habit of surviving. But what happened to somebody else really isn't important; you couldn't beat the hot chow in that brig, and while I was cooling my heels there I wasn't getting shot at.”

“But you could have been executed.”

“Not much I could do about that, was there? And it's a lot cleaner when Command kills you on purpose . . . than when they do it by accident.”

“I
guess we should have waited, huh?” Gorman's voice came out of the gloom, disembodied and dull.

“What do you mean?” Mortas answered as if in a dream. His consciousness was drifting away now that they'd consumed the second ration, refusing to concentrate on even the elementary need to post a guard. The darkness was so total that it hardly seemed necessary, and even Cranther was in no hurry to broach the topic. They'd been going nonstop since the end of the day the day before, and even though their current position wasn't perfect—­too easily trapped up there—­it seemed impossible to think of moving.

Gorman explained his comment. “Didn't you hear that? That hissing sound? I think they're putting up more flares.”

Cranther moved with great suddenness, his boots kicking Mortas's as he got his feet under him. The scout came to his full height, facing in the direction of the settlement.

Mortas stood too, a grinding sense of alarm slowly working through his lethargy. Cranther's hand gripped his arm to silence him, and that was when he heard the remotest whooshing sound, like someone brooming off a rough surface. Cranther's hand started squeezing the fabric of his sleeve, and he forced his eyes as wide as they would go in the pointless hope that it would help him see in the dark.

“No, no, no—­” The scout was fairly wringing his sleeve now, and then suddenly the intense pressure relented. The voice was choked and staccato. “Back in the hole. Get back in the hole. Everybody down.”

Mortas obeyed instantly, throwing himself forward and banging his chin against the dirt. He'd landed on top of Gorman's torso and Trent's legs, and they all began squirming around to make room and get lower. The hissing sound grew louder, far up in the night sky, like the malevolent warning of some giant winged predator. Mortas looked up just in time to see a faint trail of light and fire passing over the valley, sparks trailing behind whatever Cranther feared so much.

Then it burst over them. Lightning and thunder at the same time. A convulsive wind-­slap on their backs blowing away the gloom like the birth of a new sun. A multitude of guttural growls, followed by a rain of spherical projectiles streaking toward the ground below, through the volcanic light. Mortas cringed in the seconds it took for the bomblets to reach the wrecked vehicles, and then the fading glow from the delivery rockets abruptly erupted into flashing fire as their deadly produce detonated.

In the instant of those explosions, Mortas was almost sure that the spheres hadn't struck the ground. Only a few yards off the deck they flashed a blinding light, which was quickly followed by a sharp cracking boom that was in turn answered by dozens of sparks and popping sounds that joined together into a rolling roar. It reminded him of strings of firecrackers he'd set off in his not-­distant youth, but these were different: They were followed up by purple sparks and the pinging noise of metallic ricochets, and he recognized the weapon as a deadly Sim rocket that passed over its target area dropping dozens of anti-­personnel bomblets.

He was just beginning to wonder why they hadn't heard this kind of device fired before now when a series of deeper explosions sounded from the enemy colony. His eyes were still half blinded by the light show below, but he looked up anyway, trying to see the new threat coming their way. The explosions continued, and Cranther pushed off of him to come to a kneeling position in the hole. The three others joined him slowly, uncertain, when the first artillery round landed far down the ridgeline. It struck the escarpment near the valley floor, closer to the settlement, but it was soon followed by another and another, working randomly up and down the far end of the slope.

“Let's go, let's go, let's go!” Cranther shouted above the din as the impacting rounds began to move toward them. In the momentary flash of light of each detonation Mortas saw huge plumes of dirt thrown up in the air, and imagined the particles being ripped by hundreds of chunks of jagged metal.

An insistent hand grabbed his sleeve, and then they were up and running, straight over the knife edge and down the other side, momentarily thrown back into darkness. The dirt slid under his boots as Mortas fought to stay on his feet, one hand gripping the Mauler while the other clasped hands with someone he couldn't identify. They both skidded on the loose scree, and then another set of hands was on his blouse from behind. It was impossible to take a step, but it was also unnecessary, as they were sliding down the opposite slope as if on skis.

They might have covered quite a bit of ground that way had the enemy artillery not begun to overshoot. The explosions from the other side of the ridge now reached across for them, much closer now, and in one crack of lightning Mortas saw that all four of them had come back together, holding on to one another in an effort to stay upright. Another flash and he saw that they were already halfway down the incline, but then he saw something that almost sent him scrambling back up the slope.

The explosions reflected off a ribbon of dark fluid at the base of the ridge. Water. A stream. Serpents.

He'd just opened his mouth to shout a warning when a single round landed at the top of the ridge behind them, knocking them all over as if a giant hand had just swatted the little group. Grips lost, thrown down, rolling faster and faster, slamming into rock outcroppings and gnarled bushes, they quickly separated and crashed toward the bottom completely out of control.

Mortas hugged the Mauler to his chest, terrified that it would knock out his teeth if he tried to discard it, his eyes squeezed shut even as his mouth opened in a primal cry of terror at the very thought that they would end up in the river. His face scraped over something thorny in the darkness, he was rolling so fast that he couldn't keep his legs together, and the explosions walked closer and closer even as he started screaming, “Stop!” over and over again until he took a mouthful of sand and turned to choking instead.

His descent ended abruptly when he crashed, chest-­first, into a boulder right at the water's edge. A hard protrusion on the Sim weapon smashed into his ribs, and the sudden stop knocked the wind out of him. His face was buried in a stand of grass, and he lay there simultaneously spitting out dirt and sucking for air until another body hurtled down the slope and slammed into him.

He heard a loud splash and a frantic cry, but before he could raise his head a set of hands was under his armpits, yanking him to his feet. He turned, still choking and expecting to see Gorman, but Trent's dirty face was right in front of his own. Another round landed behind them, the blast slapping their backs with an air concussion and an echoing boom that drowned out Trent's shouted words.

Cranther appeared, soaking wet, also shouting. “Come on! We gotta cross it!”

Gorman came up next, his eyes wide in the light of the latest blast. Dirt and rock rained down on them, the slap making Mortas see that Cranther was right. The enemy guns were working both sides of the ridge now, anticipating flight, and would be on them in moments. The black water of the stream appeared in the flash of a round that hit the top of the ridge, and Mortas shivered in fear at what the dark surface might be hiding.

“Go! Go! Go! I'll cover you!” He heard his voice but didn't believe the words until he was splashing, knee-­deep, through the water. Rocks shifted under his feet, trying to trip him, as he aimed the Mauler into the blackness. He heard the sound of the others crossing behind him and took a quick look, relieved to see that the water was no more than waist deep. More rounds landed on their side of the ridge, making him flinch with each air-­tearing explosion. The flashes of illumination allowed him to see that the stream was just that, and not a river requiring a bridge.

Maybe they don't live in water this shallow.

The thought conjured up the monsters, and in the dancing, bursting light he saw one of them rear up out of the water as if trying to get a better look. It was barely ten yards in front of him, and he shouted in fright just before the Mauler went off. His reflexive shot hit the serpent dead on with the weapon's multiple pellets, and it flipped over backward as if hooked by an unseen fisherman. The air around him came alive, buffeting him first one way and then another, as more rounds impacted near the water's edge. Dirt and rocks and dead plants slapped him, but he kept his feet because of the sight before him.

In the changing light he saw the swirling surface turn to gold and then orange and then white, easily making out the disturbances as the predators came at him under the water. He turned the Mauler on the nearest one as if in a bad dream, knowing it was pointless but doing it anyway and hoping that the end would be swift. The weapon jumped in his hands and the swirling water rippled with shot, but he might just as well have saved it because they were no longer after him.

The serpent he had shot first was thrashing about madly, and the others converged on him in a horrifying rush. They weren't as big as the ones from the river, but they were just as grotesque as they leapt from the water and pounced on their wounded fellow. The water churned in the light, and Mortas ran from it as much from revulsion as from relief at deliverance.

He rushed after the splashing sounds of the others escaping, lifting his knees high and expecting at any moment to be pulled down from behind. The far bank was only yards away now, and it was almost level with the water. Gorman appeared out of the gloom, running into the water, ducking in the flash of another explosion, grabbing his arm and pulling him forward. The next moment they were out, still running, passing between two boulders and almost colliding with Cranther and Trent. The man and the woman stood stock-­still with their hands in the air as if surrendering, and as Mortas cleared the rocks a rough pair of hands yanked the Mauler from his grasp.

Something heavy clubbed him in the kidney, and he reeled forward into Trent. She caught him easily, but when Gorman was likewise propelled into her she backpedaled just a bit. It was then that Mortas saw the other figures, looming up to shove her back into position. In another burst of light he saw a Scorpion rifle, standard issue for human infantry, and the chest-­and-­torso armor he'd worn in training. Two human soldiers stood behind Trent and Cranther, and Mortas whooped in joy at the sight.

“Hey!
Hey
!” He stepped toward them, reaching out. “Am I glad to see you! I'm Lieutenant Jander Mortas!”

The barrel of the Scorpion gun came up into his face and a tired voice commanded, “Step back or I will fucking shoot you.”

“F
unny thing about this war. Sims look like us, walk like us . . . but they can't talk like us.” Mortas inclined his head in order to catch the words as they walked. The humans they'd literally bumped into had turned out to be a patrol led by a senior sergeant from the battalion staff of the mechanized infantry unit that had assaulted the planet days earlier. The big, beefy man wore shoulder armor over the olive drab one-­piece uniform of the riding infantry and carried a stubby assault weapon known as the Flayer. The six-­man patrol was a mixed bag of the survivors from the armored assault force and a company of non-­mechanized infantry normally referred to as walkers. Mortas judged two of them to be the latter; their shoulder-­and-­torso armor and Scorpion rifles were too bulky and too long to fit comfortably inside the confines of a personnel mover.

The enemy's inability to even imitate human speech had convinced the sergeant they were friendlies, but that hadn't meant they'd reached salvation. The abandoned unit was almost out of food, so it was a lucky thing that they'd found something to eat before meeting this bunch. The armored battalion had lost well over half its strength in the attack, including most of its key leaders, and Mortas was already sensing that important positions were now filled by ­people with little experience in those jobs. The sergeant had already warned Mortas that the new commander, a major who'd been the assault battalion's supply officer, might not accept them as easily as he had. When asked why that might be the case, he'd refused to answer and simply looked away.

Walking along behind the man, Mortas studied the Flayer and remembered its nickname was “the Failure” because it jammed so easily and had such limited range. One of the other soldiers now carried his Mauler, and they'd walked for some distance before Mortas realized the man had been unarmed until receiving the enemy weapon. As a group the patrol's members looked pretty ragged. The two walkers still had their helmets, head-­hugging protection that also housed their communications gear, but only two of the others had theirs. He imagined they'd taken them from dead walkers the same way the platoon sergeant had gotten his shoulder armor, and noted bandages on several arms and legs.