March Upcountry

“Yep,” Pahner said, just as quietly. He’d slung himself against a tree like the rest of the company. He had a hammock packed as well, but he’d bundled O’Casey into it. There was no way he was going to use it unless every member of the company had one. And Roger, apparently without prompting, had come to the same decision.

Amazing.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

“Wake up.”

Julian shook the private by the arm. The bead rifleman dangled limply from the tree, her face gray in the predawn light, and pried one eye open. She looked around at her wet, indescribably muddy surroundings and groaned.

“Please. Kill me,” she croaked.

Julian just shook his head with a laugh and moved on. A few moments later, he found himself looking up at the sergeant major, spinning slowly on the end of her rope and snoring. He shook his head again, thought about various humorous possibilities, and decided that they wouldn’t be good for his health.

“Wake up, Sergeant Major,” he said, touching her boot as it swung into range.

The NCO had her bead pistol out and trained before she was fully awake.

“Julian?” she grunted, and cleared her throat.

“Morning, SMaj,” the squad leader chuckled. “Wakee, wakee!”

“Time for another glorious day in the Corps,” the sergeant major replied, and pulled an end of the rope to release the knot. She splashed into the water, still holding her bead pistol out of the muck, and came up coated in a fresh covering of mud. “Morning ablutions are complete. Time to rock and roll.”

“Sergeant Major, you are too much,” Julian laughed.

“Stick with me, kid,” the senior NCO told him through her brand new mud. “We’re gonna see the galaxy.”

“Meet exotic people,” Pahner said, untying himself and stretching in the early dawn light.

“And kill them,” Julian finished.

After changing socks, the company moved out on cold rations and vague dreams of dryness. Pahner, recognizing the danger to the Marines’ feet, started cycling the company up onto the flar- ta two at a time. Even with the company’s reduced manpower, however, it would take most of the day to get everyone up for a brief respite. And it would be brief.

As the morning progressed, there was no sign of a break in the swamp, nor of the sort of increasing depth that might signal a river ahead. In fact, the humans could see no change at all in their surroundings, but the pack beasts seemed to be getting less and less happy about continuing.

Finally, when one balked, Pahner slogged up to D’Len Pah.

“What’s wrong with the beasts?” he asked.

“I think we might be in the territory of atul-grack,” the mahout answered nervously. “They’re very frightened.”

“Atul-grack?” Pahner repeated as Cord’s nephew Tratan waded up, and the young tribesman started waving all four arms in agitation.

“We must go back!”

“What?” Pahner asked. “Why?”

“Yes,” the mahout said. “We should turn around. If there are atul-grack around, we are in grave danger.”

“Well,” the human said, “are there, or aren’t there?”

“I don’t know,” Pah admitted. “But the beasts act as if they’re afraid, and the only thing that would frighten flar-ta is atul-grack.”

“Would someone please tell me what the hell an atul- grack is?” Pahner demanded in frustration.

His answer was a deafening roar.

The beast that exploded out of the swamp was a nightmare. Solid and low, like a damnbeast, the gray and black-striped monster was at least five times as large—nearly as large as the elephantine flar- ta. Its mouth was wide enough to swallow a human whole and filled with sharklike teeth, and it sprinted across the swamp like a tornado, water fountaining skyward from every impact of its six broad feet, as the company’s weapons opened up on all sides and the pack beasts erupted in pandemonium.

Roger rolled off of Patty’s back as she hot-footed away from the charging carnivore. He came up sputtering, covered in mud, but he’d managed to keep the rifle out of the swamp.

Dogzard had followed him, spinning through the air out of a sound sleep and splashing into the water beside him. The sauroid planted her amphibian hind feet in the muck and shot her head above water just long enough to determine the problem. Then she promptly ducked back under and swam away at top speed. She was a scavenger, not a fighter. And certainly not a fighter of atul-grack.

The carnivore was intent on pulling down one of the flar-ta as its dinner. It was being bracketed by grenades and hit on either side by dozens of rounds from the bead rifles, but it charged on, ignoring the pinpricks, and Roger realized that it was charging dead at Captain Pahner, who was sliding out of its way as fast as he could while firing a bead pistol at it one-handed.

The prince put the dot of the holographic sight on the beast’s temple, led it a little, and let fly.

Sergeant Major Kosutic stood up, coughing and spluttering. One of the pack beasts’ tails had hit her hard enough to harden her chameleon armor and throw her ten meters through the air and into a tree. She spun around in place and immediately spotted the bellowing carnivore that had started the ruckus. The friction-sling of her bead rifle was still attached, and she raised the weapon, then froze and checked. A twig frantically inserted into the barrel came out dry, so she switched to armor piercing and took careful aim at the head of the beast.

* * *

The two shots sounded as one, somehow echoing clearly in a lull as the rest of the company was reloading. Armand Pahner abandoned dignity and comfort for survival and threw himself into a long, shallow dive out of the way as the beast slid to a halt where he’d been standing in an all-enveloping bow wave of water, muck, and shredded swamp vegetation.

He was back up almost instantly, pistol in a two-handed grip, but the emergency was over. The beast was down and quivering, its tail thumping a slow, splashing tattoo. The back of the tiger-striped beast overtopped the tall Marine by at least half a meter, and he looked over at Roger, who was shakily reloading.

“Thank you, Your Highness,” he said, putting his pistol away with a steady hand.

“De nada,” Roger said. “Let’s just get the fuck out of this swamp.”

“Yours or mine?” Kosutic asked. She stepped up to the beast and emptied half a magazine of armor piercing into its armored head.

“Uh.” Roger examined what was left of the evidence. It sure looked like his 11-millimeter had done the main damage. “Mine, I think.”

“Yeah, well,” the NCO said as she carefully inserted another magazine, “you shoot it; you skin it.”

The good news about the thing Mardukans called an atul-grack and the humans just called a bigbeast was that they were very solitary, very territorial hunters who required at least one high, dry spot in their territory. It took a while, but Cord’s tribesmen found it.

And the river.

The large mound was clearly artificial, part of a dike system which had once contained the Hurtan River