but unhurt.
Howard shrugged. “The wolf pack doesn’t necessarily give us away. We could just be a bear carcass or something in here.”
I jerked my thumb back in the direction of the green blob in the cave. “Even if the Slugs don’t know how to track us, do you think they can track the Ganglion?”
Disconnected or not, our prisoner could have been screaming for help in Slugese at that moment, for all we knew.
Howard shrugged again. “I don’t think-”
The wolf pack, collectively, froze, noses upturned.
Howard said, “Uh-oh.”
I tugged Howard deeper into the cave’s shadows and whispered, “Whatever they smell, we can’t see. The wind’s coming from upslope, behind us.”
Outside, the wolves retreated another fifty yards from the mouth of our cave as a shadow crossed it.
My heart pounded, and I squeezed off my rifle’s grip safety.
The shadow shuffled past the cave mouth. Another replaced it, then more. As they strode into the light, the shadows resolved into trumpeting, truck-sized furballs the color of rust.
Howard whispered, “Mammoth.”
The herd bull strode toward the wolf pack, bellowing, head back to display great curved tusks. The wolves retreated again.
Howard said, “If we shot a mammoth out there, the carcass would explain the wolf pack. It could make an excellent distraction.”
He was right. I raised my M40 and sighted on the nearest cow, but at this range I could have dropped her with a hip shot.
Then I paused. “The carcass might attract those big cats.” Weichsel’s fauna paralleled Pleistocene Earth in many ways, but our Neolithic forefathers never saw saber-toothed snow leopards bigger than Bengal tigers.
Really, my concern with Howard’s idea wasn’t baiting leopards. Saber teeth can’t scuff Eternads any more than wolf teeth can. I just didn’t want to shoot a mammoth.
It sounded absurd. I couldn’t count the Slugs that had died at my hand or on my orders in this war. And over my career I had taken human lives, too, when the United States in its collective wisdom had lawfully ordered me to.
It wasn’t as though any species on Weichsel was endangered, except us humans, of course. The tundra teemed with life, a glacial menagerie. Weichsel wouldn’t miss one mammoth.
So why did I rationalize against squeezing my trigger one more time?
I couldn’t deny that war calloused a soldier to brutality. But as I grew older, I cherished the moments when I could choose not to kill.
I lowered my rifle. “Let’s see what happens.”
By midmorning, events mooted my dilemma. The wolves isolated a lame cow from the mammoth herd, brought her down two hundred yards from us, and began tearing meat from her woolly flanks like bleeding rugs. The mammoth herd stood off, alternately trumpeting in protest at the gore-smeared wolves, then bulldozing snow with their sinuous tusks to get at matted grass beneath. For both species, violence was another day at the office.
Howard and I withdrew inside the cave, to obscure our visual and infrared signatures, and sat opposite our prisoner.
The Ganglion just floated there, animated only by the vibrations of its motility plate. After thirty years of war, all I knew about the blob was that it was my enemy. I had no reason to think it knew me any differently. For humans and Slugs, like the mammoths and wolves, violence had become another day at the office.
Howard, this blob, and I were on the cusp of changing that. If I could get us off Weichsel alive. At the moment, getting out alive required me to freeze my butt off in a hole, contemplating upcoming misery and terror. After a lifetime in the infantry, I was used to that.
The sound came from somewhere behind the cave, and the mag rifle round struck a bull mammoth’s flank. The herd stampeded away, to our front, and after a hundred yards, another volley of Slug rifle fire dropped a half dozen of them.
Slugs behind us. Slugs in front of us. It was coincidence. More likely, it was that they had picked up the signature of Howard’s rifle shots.
I unsnapped my ammunition pouches, because when the maggots come, they come faster than a casual reload can bring them down.
Howard did the same, shaking his head and muttering under his breath, “Oboy.”
SEVENTEEN
TWENTY MINUTES LATER, the first movement of Slugs showed in my optics, around the distant mammoth carcasses. I couldn’t see the Slugs, but I saw curving, uplifted lines carving the snow like shark-fin wakes as the maggots tunneled closer.
The little bastards never tired of coming up with surprises for us.
“Bullfrog, this is Scorpion leader. Over.” My heart skipped. The voice in my earpiece was faint but welcome. I glanced at Howard, and he nodded as he tapped his own earpiece.
I said into my helmet mike, “This is Bullfrog, Scorpion leader. You got a fix on our transponders? Over.”
“No fix, Bullfrog. We’ve just been cruising and broadcasting. Can you say your position? Over.”
Howard popped his visor and spoke to me. “Between the cave and the storm’s atmospherics, they can’t find us.”
“I cannot provide my position, Scorpion leader. But can you see the Slugs to our front and rear? There must be thousands. Over.”
“No visible Slugs, Bullfrog.” Of course not. The pilots were looking for traditional Slug massed Warriors, in black armor. But the maggots were burrowing beneath the snow.
“Look harder! They’re in our laps.”
“Bullfrog, we can’t see jack squat from up here. Our combat floor is now fifteen thousand. Except for pickup. We can’t pick up what we can’t find.”
I swore into the mike. “How many did you lose to the heavys yesterday?”
“Six, Bullfrog. We gotta stay high or we won’t do you or us any good at all.”
Zoomies never changed. Late in the last century, before the Second Afghan, even before the First Afghan, the old Soviet empire’s gunships had been chased back to altitudes that rendered them ineffective against ground targets by a few well-placed shoulder-fired missiles. Not that I blamed the Zoomies. Scorpions and their pilots were in short supply, especially to the pilots’ loved ones.
I crawled to the cave mouth, raised my finger cam, and peeked. The burrows converging on us numbered in the hundreds, and the closest were a hundred yards away. And that was just in front of us. The noose was certainly drawing close on our flanks and rear, too.
I dug in my thigh pocket, jerked out my last smoke canister, and lobbed it out into the open. As purple smoke billowed in a widening cone, I said, “Scorpion leader, I have marked my position with smoke. Do you identify? Over.”
“I haven’t seen smoke since flight school, Bullfrog. Where the hell… Okay. I identify purple smoke. Over.”
“I confirm. Purple smoke. Target is troops in the open. Under a foot of snow. What are you packing?”
The closest burrows were fifty yards away now.
“Antipersonnel CBUs. Where you want ’em? Over.”
