March To The Stars

'All I wanted to be was a pilot,' he muttered, kneeling down beside the shaman. He looked across at the local female, who had shed her enveloping disguise somewhere along the way. 'I'm going to need six arms for this, so you're elected. Hold out your hands.'

'What is this?' Pedi asked, holding out all four hands as the human ran a wand over them.

'It scares away the demons,' Dobrescu snapped. 'It will reduce the infection—the gut-fever, you'd call it. He's hit bad, so it won't stop it entirely. But it will stop us from increasing the infection.'

'He'll die,' Pedi said softly. 'I can smell the gut. He will die. My benan. What can I say to my father?'

'Screw your father,' Dobrescu snarled. He tapped the female, who seemed about to drift off into la-la land, on the forehead. 'Hey! Blondie, look at me!'

Pedi snapped her head up to snarl at the medic, but froze at his expression.

'We are not going to lose him!' Dobrescu barked, and thumped her on the forehead again. Harder. 'We. Are. Not. Going. To. Lose. Him. Get that into your head, and get ready to help. Understand?'

'What should I do?' Pedi asked.

'Exactly what I say,' Dobrescu answered quietly. He looked at the mess in Cord's abdomen and shook his head. 'I'm a goddammed medic, not a xeno-surgeon.'

Cord was unconscious and breathing shallowly. Dobrescu had intubated the shaman and run in an oxygen line. He didn't have a decent anesthetic for the Mardukans, or a gas-passer, for that matter. But he'd given the shaman an injection of 'sleepy juice,' an extract of one of the most noxious of Marduk's fauna, the killerpillar. If he had the dosage right, Cord wouldn't feel a thing. And he might even wake up after the 'operation.'

'Here we go,' the warrant muttered, taking the spear by the shaft.

He started by using a laser scalpel to elongate the opening in the abdominal wall. The shaman's muscles had bound around the spearhead, and it was necessary to open the hole outward to extract the weapon. He applied two auto-extractors that slowly spread the opening, pulling away each of the incised layers in turn.

He finally had a good look at the damage, and it was pretty bad. The spear was lodged on the edge of the Mardukan equivalent of a liver, which was just about where humans kept one. There was a massive blood vessel just anterior of where the spear seemed to stop, and Dobrescu shook his head again at the shaman's luck. Another millimeter, a bad drop on the way back, and Cord would have bled out in a minute.

The spearhead had also perforated the shaman's large, small, and middle-zone intestine—the latter a Mardukan feature without a human analog—and ruptured a secondary stomach. But the damage to each was minor, and it looked like he wouldn't have to resect anything.

The worst problem was that a lesser blood vessel, a vein, had been punctured. If they didn't get it sewn up soon, the shaman would bleed to death anyway. The only reason he hadn't already was that the spear was holding the puncture partly closed.

'I'm going to pull this out,' Dobrescu said, pointing to the spearhead. 'When I do, he's going to bleed like mad.' He handed the Mardukan female two temp-clamps. 'I'm going to point to where I want those while I'm working. You need to get them on fast, understand?'

'Understand,' Pedi said, seriously. 'On my honor.'

'Honor,' the medic snorted. 'I just wanted to fly shuttles. Was that too much to ask?'

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

For the first time in a career that had seen the term used more times than he cared to remember, Armand Pahner had just discovered what 'having your back to the wall' really felt like.

It was a much more powerful metaphor, under the circumstances, than he had previously believed. But that was because it was unpleasant to literally stand with his back to a closed gate while more and more enemies closed in on the humans and their allies. The Basik's Own was being pushed back into a broad 'C' around the gate, and he knew that unless they got the gate opened—somehow—they were all going to be killed.

And eaten.

That was more than enough to convince any CO that he was in for a bad day. In Pahner's case, however, it was only one minor, additional item. Armand Pahner was widely known as a man who got steadily calmer as the situation got worse. Which was undoubtedly the reason his voice was very, very calm when Sergeant Major Kosutic turned up to report in.

'And where,' he asked her, 'is Roger?'

The same circumstances which produced monumental calmness in the captain produced a sort of manic humor in the sergeant major, and Kosutic swept off her helmet and cocked her head at him.

'Feeling a bit tense, Captain?' she inquired, and Pahner gave her a thin smile.

'Sergeant Major,' he replied quietly, 'I have known you for some years. And we need every gun we can muster. So I will not kill you. If... you tell me where Prince Roger is. Right Now.'

'Up there.' Kosutic pointed upward as a sound of releasing locks echoed through the gate tower. 'Opening the gates.'

'Great,' Pahner said with the grumpiness reserved for the moments when he found himself with no option but to depend upon his rambunctious charge's talent for surviving one near-suicidal bit of mayhem or another without him. 'Now if we can just break contact, we'll be home free.'

* * *

Poertena winced as the breaching charge blew in another heavy wooden door. The tower's internal defenses required double charges, and the overpressure slapping at the Marine caused his suit to go momentarily rigid yet again.

There probably wasn't much of a threat left on the other side of the portal, given the hail of splinters the charge should have blasted into the room. But Momma Poertena's boy hadn't made it this far on the basis of 'probably,' and he wasn't about to take chances when they were this close to home. So he thumbed the tab on a concussion grenade, tossed it into the room beyond, and waited until the weapon had gone off before following it through the shattered doorway.

The room was filled with a haze of propellant residue, but two Krath were still partially functional on the far side of the room. One was hopping up and down, clutching a piece of shrapnel in his leg, and the other was just climbing back to his feet after the dual explosions. Two shotgun rounds sufficed to deal with them, then Poertena took a closer look at the room and grunted in satisfaction as he spotted the large barrels stacked against the wall.

'About pocking time. CLEAR!'

'That what we came for?' Neteri asked as he entered behind the Pinopan and swept his rifle from side to side.

'Yeah,' Poertena replied. 'Get some of t'em Vashin up here; we gonna need some muscle.' The armorer pulled the wrench he'd reclaimed once the gate was raised out of his pack and looked at the chocks holding the barrels in place. 'I hope I don' bury myself doing t'is.'

* * *

Pahner stepped through the second set of gates, looked around, and nodded. At least there wasn't an immediate threat on the far side of the walls.

The area beyond the gate was open for about a hundred meters—an obvious cleared defensive zone. Beyond that, however, a solid bank of buildings stretched as far as could be seen in the gloom. Obviously, the city continued well beyond the walls.

The heavy ash-fall seemed to be easing, and a little light was starting to peek through. Both of those changes were—probably—good signs. The ash was a misery for everyone, and some additional light on the battle would be helpful.