Steel World (26 page)

“This must be their Galactic spaceport,” I said. “The
real
one.”

I received a number of faceless stares from their visors. Every planet had one spaceport that was authorized to engage in interstellar trade. The Nairb, working as agents of the Galactics, liked to keep a close eye on ships from other systems, making sure they traded only what they were allowed to. Their presence indicated this spaceport handled interstellar trade.

“But what the hell are we doing here?” Carlos asked. We were all thinking it, but he was the only one that voiced the thought. “If we mess with their interstellar port, won’t the Galactics get pissed off?”

“That’s enough chatter,” Veteran Harris shouted. “Save it for the run. We’re not done yet. We’re running up those steps. Look!”

We turned away from the Nairb ship and paid attention to where we were going again.

“We’re climbing the outer walls?” Carlos asked in disbelief.

“That’s what it looks like,” I said.

We watched as the leading elements of the cohort reached the walls surrounding the main complex, which had to be the terminal and warehouses. Such areas had strong security. There were saurian guards there, posted on those walls. They were watching us, and we watched them.

“They must be wondering what the hell is going on,” I said.

“Yeah, they’re probably radioing their headquarters, reporting this invasion firsthand.”

It wasn’t until elements of the first squad reached the top of the walls that things turned ugly. The saurian guards were all raptor-types, and they were well-armed. They had armor on, which glinted in the overly-bright sunlight.

For the record, I was slightly proud to see we didn’t fire the first shot. Maybe that was what the tribune had planned all along. Maybe Drusus had decided to just send us charging at the walls in vast numbers, looking scary, to force the dinos to act.

The guards soon figured out we weren’t tourists. They began closing the gates as we reached them, but a hundred or so troops made it through before they clanged together. When the light troops mounted the steps inside, the guards finally opened fire.

This was an expansion of the war, a breaking of the rules. Normally, events at the spaceport were very civilized. We’d brought warfare and mayhem to our enemy, on ground of our own choosing. I could imagine that the saurians had been communicating with their leaders, surprised and uncertain as to how to proceed.

When they did get the order to fire on us, we were shocked by their powerful weaponry. Each saurian guard had a long tube which rode on his shoulder. I didn’t recognize the weapon type, but I knew it wasn’t going to be snap-rifles versus teeth this time.

Violet gouts of energy leapt off the walls, quickly burning down the men who’d made it inside. There were at least thirty heavily-armed and armored guards up there now, and more were showing up all the time. They directed their beams down onto the tarmac like men with fire hoses, nailing those of us who were locked outside the compound. The beams incinerated whatever they touched. Men fell burning like a field of dry grass.

I felt glad as I watched that we weren’t the first to reach those walls. As there was no way through, our orders changed.

“That’s it!” screamed Harris into our headsets. “Break ranks, squad, follow me!”

He veered to the right, and we followed him in a knot.

“Spread out! Spread out! Run for that truck!”

We were running all out now. The only cover nearby was a refueling truck. We’d almost reached it when another squad beat us to it. They huddled close, and began peppering the enemy on the walls with their snap-rifles.

We slowed down and Harris lifted his arm, directing us toward another, more distant scrap of cover. This time it was a communications tower of some kind.

We never heard his order to move on, however. Suddenly, the refueling truck a group of our troops were hugging up to was taken out. It flared cherry-red—then transformed into a white explosion.

My entire squad was thrown off their feet. Some of us had burning uniforms. The squad that had been taking cover behind the truck had vanished. There were only a few smoking boots and broken bits of gear left.

“Head for the tower,” Harris said. “From there, we’ll spread out and charge the wall.”

It was insane, but we had no other choice. There were landing pits for ships here and there, but nothing that wasn’t over a mile off. The walls of the terminal building were closer than that.

From all around us, groups of troops began firing. They were exposed, but we outnumbered the enemy fifty to one. Things changed when some of our weaponeers got their big projectors set up and raked the top of the wall. The enemy was forced to duck, and I saw some of them get knocked right off their perches.

I’d had some hopes that the early assaulters would win through and take the wall for us, saving those of us still out in the open. But despite their surprise tactics, they were burned away, swept right off the puff-crete stairways by the heavy energy weapons. Unarmored, light troops couldn’t take any kind of hit from such powerful guns.

“I hit one with my rifle,” Carlos complained. “I swear I did. No penetration, zero.”

“How the hell are we going to get up those walls?” Kivi asked. There was a touch of panic in her voice.

Veteran Harris didn’t answer right away. We’d reached the tower, and were hiding behind it. They couldn’t take this structure down as easily as a truck full of fuel—it was a solid building.

That didn’t stop them from trying. As soon as they noticed we were hiding back there and taking potshots from cover, they swept the base of the tower with their energy weapons.

Only one of us got hit. Kivi was too slow to pull back—either that, or she never saw it coming. She was there one second, screwing on her scope and barrel-extension to turn her snap-rifle into a sniper’s weapon, and the next—she was gone. There wasn’t much left. At least it was quick.

“Damn,” I whispered.

Harris came to me and banged his hand on my shoulder. “McGill, I need a volunteer.”

I nodded. It was my fate to be the perpetual volunteer.

Harris seemed to divine my thoughts. “This isn’t bullshit to get you killed. We have to get into this battle. We’re pinned down and taking heavy losses.”

I nodded again. He pointed to a small car sitting behind the tower. I stared at it, hoping he wasn’t serious.

“Take that thing to the wall.”

“Sir, I could run faster.”

His big hand lifted from my shoulder and slammed the back of my helmet.

“Maybe,” he said, “but you can’t fly.”

I looked at the unit again, and I understood. It was an air car. The smallest, sorriest, golf-cart-looking air car I’d ever seen.

“Take a man with you to fly shotgun,” he said.

I looked at Carlos, and I grinned.

“Just because I woke you up on the transport?” he demanded.

“No, because you snapped my ass with a towel while I was puking.”

“Oh yeah, that.”

We climbed in and had it working twenty seconds later. Air cars were part of the tech the Galactics handed out to every world. They weren’t special enough to warrant shipping from one planet to the next, but they were cool.

Fortunately, the controls were virtually identical on worlds with humanoid populations. Saurians were a stretch, but they did have the same number of limbs and were about the same dimensions. The tail-holes in the seats made you feel like you were going to slide out backward into the air and fall, however.

I poured on the vertical lift, and we sailed higher and higher. I suspected at that moment that the saurians had refused to pay for air power in the contract so we couldn’t do things exactly like this. They’d wanted us to stay trapped on the ground with them, stacking the deck in any way they could.

When we passed over the tower, I veered off and flew at an angle. I already had a plan. From my vantage point in the air, I saw another lifter had landed and I was going to park behind it and hide, looking for a moment to charge in and land in the compound. If we could get behind the saurians, they would have to worry about us. They’d have a much harder time killing all our attacking troops on the tarmac.

The second lifter, I realized after a moment’s surprise, was one of ours. As I watched, troops gushed out of it. I was disappointed to see it was another cohort of lightly-armed recruits.

These guys never had a chance. The saurians weren’t about to be taken by surprise from another flank again. They unloaded on them the moment they ran down the ramp.

A hundred died in the first minute. They never even knew what hit them. The survivors were in shock, rolling under the ramp itself, trying to climb back up onto the ship—the saurians were giving them hell.

They made sure not to damage the ship itself, of course. There were rules to this game of war. We could kill saurians and destroy their equipment. They could do the same to us. But any neutral aliens—or especially Galactics, as I’d found out—were strictly off limits.
Corvus
and all her lifters were owned by the Skrull. Unless they attacked directly, they were non-combatants.

“Fly around to the other side—fly low and fast,” Carlos shouted.

I didn’t have any good ideas at the moment, and I was sickened by the waste of good troops coming off the second lifter. Against my better judgment, I did as he suggested. We dove around behind the lifter and skimmed low. We dashed in a spiraling circle after that, moving around the walls of the terminal.

“They’re all focusing on the second lifter, trying to kill every troop that comes down the ramp. While they’re occupied, we’ll swoop in from the other side.”

It was worth a try, so I did it. The move almost worked, to Carlos’ credit. We were within about two hundred meters of the wall and zooming toward it when the enemy finally noticed us—or at least one of them did.

He must have been posted on the far side of the complex by someone with a brain. Instead of joining the feeding-frenzy of his comrades on the side of the wall where all the action was, he stood his post on our side, looking bored.

Even so, he had his head cranked around to watch the interesting stuff going on behind him. When he finally spotted us it was almost too late.

He raised his heavy tube and directed it toward our tiny craft. One of us began screeching in fear—I’m pretty sure it was Carlos.

I pulled back on the steering controls, which was essentially a tube of metal with a v-shaped head on it. My action caused the craft to buck upward, and we rose rapidly into the air.

The dino’s first shot burned the air under us. We saw the blinding glare of colored plasma, like a flame-thrower, gush past below. Not satisfied with a miss, he levered it upward to track us. I thought I knew how a bug felt when a spray of deadly gas came out of a gardener’s can.

I heaved to the right, away from the plasma. This threw us into a corkscrew spin. We went over the walls and crashed on a roof inside the compound.

Carlos rolled out on top of me. I thought my leg was broken for a few seconds, but I forced it to work and the pain subsided. I rolled Carlos off me and got out my weapon. I expected at any instant the saurian that had spotted us was going to burn us both to ash.

The next gush of energy roared over our heads, however. I realized that the roof we were on was higher than the wall that ringed the compound. He couldn’t hit us from his position. We were safe for the moment.

I groaned and struggled to get back into the game.

“My ribs are broken,” Carlos said, wheezing.

“Get up anyway.”

On our hands and knees, we crept to the edge of the roof.

I couldn’t believe it—but we’d made it inside the compound.

-19-

The first thing we did was try to find a way down into the building. I figured if we could get inside, we’d be safe, because the building was full of Nairb. As non-combatant aliens, no one was allowed to fight in their presence and risk injuring them—that was against Galactic Law.

Unfortunately, we ran into a problem immediately: there was no way into the building from the roof.

“Any human would have put at least a hatch on this roof!” complained Carlos.

I had to agree with him. I’d had more than my fill of cultural differences for the day.

“We have to find a way down or we’ll be pinned up here, and they’ll come kill us eventually.”

In the end, it took some risky behavior to find the way down. Instead of ladders, or internal stairways, the saurians had built an external set of steep stairs that went down one side of the structure. The stairs were exposed and there wasn’t even a guardrail.

Carlos and I looked at one another. I knew what we were both thinking: did we run down those stairs, risking annihilation, or did we lay on the rooftop and hope our side won the battle?

“I guess we have to do what we can sniping from up here,” Carlos said.

I shook my head. “Sniping isn’t enough. We can’t get through their armor without focused fire.”

“What do you suggest?” he asked suspiciously.