Steel World (41 page)

I turned to leave, but his good hand lashed out and gripped the fabric of my sleeve.

“McGill?” he asked, giving me an odd look. “If you see that red lizard of yours again—tell me about it.”

I smiled. “Will do, sir.”

As I walked across the rally point, Specialist Matis flagged me down.

“Good news, Recruit,” he said.

“About the latest wave of lizards?” I asked. “Don’t worry, they’ll never kill us all.”

He paused. “I don’t know about that,” he said, “but I’ve been in communication with Corvus. I’ve talked to the orderlies. They’ve dropped the charges. You’re in the clear.”

“That is good news. How did that happen?”

He shrugged and gave me a thin smile. “Sometimes people change their minds. At least now you know you can die down here in peace.”

“Doesn’t have to happen,” I said. “We’ll win.”

“That’s the spirit!” Matis said half-heartedly.

I could tell he didn’t think we were going to win this one. I could easily see why. Each attack took out at least a dozen men—more each time. At this rate, we’d be down to a handful huddling underground by morning. Then, the smaller saurians would infiltrate the tunnels and finish us off.

“Hold on a second,” he called out to me as I turned to go back to my post.

“Specialist?”

He gave me a strange look. “I could take care of it now, you know,” he said quietly. “One injection and it will all be over. You’re fighting on a bad grow anyway. Let me fix the mistake.”

I opened my mouth, then closed it again. I saw he had a needle in his hand. The syringe was a large one and it dribbled amber liquid.

“I’m fine,” I said.

“Hey!” roared a voice.

We startled and looked toward Leeson, who wandered closer. He glared at Matis. “What are you, some kind of ghoul?” he demanded.

“I’m sorry sir, but I’m sure I don’t know—”

“Yeah, yeah,” Leeson grumbled. “Leave my man alone. I need every hand topside. If you offer another soldier a free trip into space, I’ll put you on report.”

Matis made a prim face. He looked as if he smelled something putrid. “That won’t be necessary, Adjunct.”

“Make sure it isn’t.”

I left quickly after that. What was it with bios and killing people? They seemed to want to offer up death as some kind of benefit. I supposed that to them it looked like a good thing. This battle was hopeless and vicious. Wasn’t a needle and a quick, heart-stopping injection better than getting torn apart by hungry monsters?

But, as I reached my new post, I began to wonder. Matis’ expression hadn’t been kind, it had been devious. He’d been hiding something. Why tell me I was in the clear then offer me a quick death? Could it be he’d lied about me being in the clear?

I wasn’t sure what his motives were, but I decided I didn’t want to die just now.

I reached my new post and slithered up into position. There were a number of dead juggers and troops around, and I didn’t like the look of things. This bunker had been overrun more than once, just as my last one had. The only difference was this position still had an active weaponeer.

“Weaponeer Borges?” I asked. “Can I do a quick patrol? I want to check my firing ranges and entry points.”

“Out there?” he asked, his voice indicating he thought I was crazy. He was a beefy guy with eyebrows that came together into one big, black caterpillar when he frowned, which he was doing now. “You’re nuts. That pee-shooter of yours isn’t going to do anything but piss them off, anyway.”

“Still, Specialist,” I said, “I’d like to see what’s nearby before the next wave. They aren’t due for ten minutes.”

Borges huffed at that. “Enemies don’t keep appointments, Recruit. But okay, if you want to be first on the buffet this time, I’ll let you. Keep in mind, if I see you jump into a lizard’s mouth just to get out of here, you’re going on report.”

“Right, sir,” I said, and walked away across the compound.

I heard Borges and the others laughing behind me. I didn’t care. At some point, every soldier caught up in a long battle stops caring about the small stuff.

It took me a few minutes, and I was beginning to get antsy by the time I found what I was looking for. A different corpse, one I recognized, was near one of the entrances on a pile of juggers stacked three high.

It was a crimson lizard. I shined my belt light on it to be sure, and took several snaps. The ridged belly-scar was precisely the same as the last two times I’d seen this exact enemy.

What the hell was going on?

-31-

I was still out eyeballing the mysterious red jugger when the next attack came. I wasn’t sure, but it seemed early to me. Maybe the lizards were losing patience.

The first clue came with the sound of scrabbling along the walls outside. We didn’t have scouts out there anymore because there weren’t enough troops left alive for that. We didn’t have cameras on the walls either, as they’d all been knocked out. Since our techs weren’t even allowed to fly spy drones, we were blind.

When I heard the stealthy sounds of saurians on the move, I didn’t bother waiting around. I sprinted for the crater-like shelter we’d been assigned.

“Incoming!” I shouted on the squad channel.

Ahead of me, the guys in the bunker scrambled into position.

“Are you sure, McGill?” demanded Specialist Borges.

I didn’t bother to answer. The enemy was proving me right. They were pouring in through the damaged walls, and this time they weren’t fooling around.

Right before they hit, the sky lit up overhead. Artillery—it couldn’t be anything else.

When this long battle had begun days earlier, both sides had held off on using big guns because we couldn’t risk killing the Nairbs. Now that they were absent, we still hadn’t deployed so much as a mortar. I knew that, in our case, it was because we hadn’t been issued any since the heavy troops had withdrawn. For the saurians, I suspected they didn’t want to be seen using a weapon we didn’t have. They wanted to prove they could beat us without superior arms.

So far, they were pulling it off. I was definitely feeling the burn. We were losing this fight, one death at a time.

I dove into the bunker and small arms fire splattered the burnt walls all around me. I didn’t know juggers could carry guns…

“Raptors!” Borges shouted. “Hundreds of them! This is it!”

He was right. The enemy force wasn’t made up of all juggers this time. They were coming in with regular saurian troops. At least they weren’t armored, but that didn’t make me feel much better. The smaller ones were smart and just as deadly. What they didn’t have in sheer size and power they made up for with cunning and, in this case, weaponry.

Of the two types of lizards I’d met up with on this godforsaken hole of a planet, I think I preferred to fight with the juggers. I felt less paranoid when I fought them—I think that’s why. They came in charging hard, and they either died or you did. They’d terrified me at first—but the fear had lessened as I grew accustomed to fighting with them. You didn’t have to worry about getting taken out by a sniper or an infiltrator who’d snuck in behind your lines.

Wriggling like a frightened snake into my position right over the legs of my comrades, I put my snap-rifle up and sought a target. The others were rattling away, providing suppressing fire. This seemed to be slowing the enemy down. They were working their way toward us, dashing from one broken scrap of puff-crete to the next.

Using the night scope, I could see they weren’t heavily armored. They were light troops, like our own. I thought about that for a second—and it made sense. They’d been watching us for years, copying our techniques and apparently some of our organization, as well. I’d seen both unarmored light saurians and heavily armored pros. These definitely fell into the former category. That was a relief because I knew my gun could kill them.

The second I saw a snout, I opened up. Firing short bursts, I forced the raptor to jerk back—but then he made a sprint for another, closer piece of cover. Around him, a group of his comrades began to fire back at us. They sprayed our bunker with rounds.
The bullets sparked green against our sheltering walls when seen through my scope. Lizards weren’t great marksman, but I realized they were covering the one that was on the move.

I took a chance. I lifted my head up and held the trigger down. The recoil was jumpy on my weapon as it went into full-auto mode. Fighting to control it, I swept it after the saurian who was exposed. How that bastard could run!

Fortunately, not even a sprinting three hundred pound lizard can outrun a sliver from a snap-rifle. I hit him a dozen times, and he fell in a tumbling heap. It took ten times as much fire to bring down a jugger because there was so much more meat and bone on them.

This seemed to piss off the others behind him. They lashed our position with fire, and we were forced to duck and wait it out.

“Hold, hold, NOW!” shouted Borges, timing the enemy tactics. He called it perfectly. The moment he said “NOW”, we wriggled back up into our firing positions and found them advancing, firing sporadically into our bunker. They’d gotten brave when we hadn’t returned fire for a while.

We mowed them. The weaponeer finally unleashed the power of his big tube, shortening up the focus and sweeping the beam laterally. At least ten of them went down, their bodies seared with huge stripes of blackened flesh. They thrashed and made strange, croaking sounds.

I ignored the ones he nailed with the plasma sweep and poured rounds into those that were still on their feet. It was over in fifteen seconds, I’d say. Broken, the enemy fled for cover in every direction.

We cheered and high-fived one another in the bunker. Borges slapped me on the helmet twice, roaring: “Did you see that? Did you see that?”

I assured him that I did. But I wasn’t in any mood for celebrating. I used my scope to scan the other bunkers to our sides and rear.

“Specialist!” I shouted. “Left flank, I think they breached Five!”

Everyone shut up, slithered back into their spots and swung their weapons to the west. The sounds of slaughter came in over our headsets as Borges connected to command chat and piped it to our helmets.

I wasn’t happy he’d decided to share the input. Men and women screamed and hyperventilated into their microphones as they died. A few times, I thought I heard crunching sounds. We all did, and it was making us wince.

“Let’s engage,” he said.

I couldn’t argue with him. Bunker Five was pretty much gone, and the odds of us hitting a living human target were low. It looked like a feeding frenzy over there. We reloaded as quickly as we could, shifted on our bellies, and waited for the signal.

Borges announced our entry into the fight with a direct beam into the pack of them. It punched a hole through the mass of bodies which came out the other side. We supported his big gun with our sprays of bullets. Caught from behind and exposed, the enemy melted. They broke off the attack and scattered for cover.

A few of them, however, dove into the mess in the bunker and returned fire. I was shocked to see our own snap-rifles used against us. Not every saurian was armed, but they were resourceful. They figured out the mechanism and forced us to respect the incoming hail of metal. It wasn’t well-aimed, but it was accurate enough to make us hunker down.

“I wish our rifles had friend-or-foe recognition on them,” Borges said. “If we built them, they would!”

I hugged the ground and found I agreed with him. But I knew we couldn’t build our own accelerator rifles. Advanced weaponry was to be produced by the manufacturing planet that held the patent, which, in this case, was a world called “Coventry” by humanity—and some unpronounceable series of clicks by the native population of insects. Unless a competing race could prove they had a better product, no one in this sector of the galaxy was allowed to sell even a knock-off. Earth would have liked to copy and steal the tech, but we weren’t allowed to make or distribute anything similar.

Since they had to accommodate a variety of races, snap-rifles were made to fit an average-build humanoid—or just about anything with hands or claws. They were a bit too small for us, and even smaller in the claws of a saurian, but I supposed that gave them the broadest possible market. They were fine weapons, that much I had to admit.

While we exchanged fire with the enemy that had taken Bunker Two, disaster struck. We’d all focused on the breach in our lines, wanting to repel it. Borges was on the command line talking to Leeson and following orders. The officers wanted the enemy out of that bunker and pushed back. Apparently, we’d lost about a quarter of our entrenched positions.

Unfortunately, the enemy had other ideas. The juggers we’d been expecting in the first place finally made their appearance. Somehow, we’d all thought the enemy had shifted tactics, using armed saurians instead of the regularly timed waves of juggers. That turned out not to be the case. The juggers showed up right when it looked like we were going to win.

The sound of their pounding feet, each step slamming down with around two thousand pounds of force, alerted us. I was the second guy to notice the enemy charge, squirming around to face the new unexpected threat. The first guy who saw them fired about a dozen rounds, then simply screamed and died a moment later, chomped by jaws as big as a bulldozer’s.