“As long as we have to,” answered Frede.
“Do you have something else in mind?” I asked Quint.
He gave me a curious look: part worry, part eagerness. “The troop’s morale is still high, sir. We’ve been killing those bastards all night long. But if we have to continue just standing here and taking it, morale will start to crumble. Especially if the Skorpis don’t break off their attack at dawn.”
“What are you trying to say?”
“I think we should counterattack them, sir. Battles are won by the moral factor as much as by attrition or maneuver. Hit back at them, run them off, scatter them and kill them. That’s what we should do.”
“You live longer on the defense,” Frede said. “Attacking troops take higher casualties than defending.”
“And we have no idea of how many of them are still out there,” Vorl pointed out. “We could be charging into millions of them.”
“That’s the key point,” I said. “We don’t know what we’re up against, how many of the enemy are facing us and what their intentions are.”
A trio of rocket grenades slammed in around us, throwing us against the crumbling sides of the crater.
“Here they come again!” shouted one of the sergeants.
No more time for discussions. The enemy solved our argument for us. We crawled out of the crater and headed for our individual squads, or what was left of them. The Skorpis were charging at us now, bawling out their hideous war cries and running straight into our guns. We fired and fired and fired, pouring laser beams into them, knocking them down, severing legs and arms and heads, killing them by the scores, by the hundreds.
And still they came at us. The sky began to lighten, although I barely noticed it, I was so busy fighting. And the clouds of dust and smoke obscured the coming dawn.
My rifle finally gave out, its power pack drained completely. There was no time to replace it. I yanked out my pistol and fired point-blank at the huge Skorpis warrior who was charging down on me. The beam burned through his armor and went completely through his body, yet his momentum was so great that his dying body hurtled into mine, nearly knocking me off my feet.
It was hand-to-hand now, and the Skorpis had tremendous advantages of size. My senses went into overdrive again, slowing down everything around me to dreamlike slow motion. I reached down and grabbed my combat knife, a deadly thirty centimeters of serrated blue steel. And suddenly I was Orion the primitive warrior once again, shooting and clubbing and slashing at the enemies around me. The world dissolved into a bloodred haze as I cut a swath through the swarming Skorpis.
They were huge, much bigger than I, but I was far faster. They seemed to move like sluggish mountains, arms the width of my torso, shoulders wider than two normal men, their catlike faces towering over me, contorted into snarling masks of rage and pain and hate. Their body armor, designed to reflect laser beams, was too light to stop my knife thrusts. I fired my pistol at their slitted eyes, blinding them if nothing else, and ripped at their throats or hearts with my knife.
They fought back, but I could see their massive arms moving languidly to aim their pistols, see their eyes shifting, see them stumbling and staggering as they tried to back away from me. In vain.
Four of them were charging at me, laser pistols sparking, making my armor glow. I shot one in the throat, then swung my beam across the second’s visor. I ripped open the gun hand of the third and kicked the fourth in the chest hard enough to make him stagger backward. The second one lifted his visor and I shot him through his cat’s eye, clubbed the one who was clutching his slashed hand with the butt of my pistol, then shot him in the base of his skull as he fell.
The fourth one threw his pistol at me; it must have been drained of power. I saw it revolving lazily through the smoke-filled air and flicked it away with the length of my blade. The Skorpis howled and leaped at me, clawed hands reaching for my throat. I sidestepped and fired a laser bolt into his neck. His head twisted and he landed on his face with a jarring thump. Before he could move I leaped on his back and drove my knife through his armor and into his heart.
I jumped to my feet and turned full circle. It was all over. There were no more of them to kill. I stood alone in the midst of their fallen bodies, knife dripping their dark black blood, pistol hot enough in my hand to scorch my flesh if I had not been wearing battle gloves. They lay all around me, dead or dying.
I blinked and turned again, every sense stretched to its utmost, every molecule of my body tensed for more danger, every atom of my being lusting for battle. It had been built into me; I had been created to kill. I swung around a third time, looking for more enemies. There were none.
A handful of my troops were left. Those still standing were gaping at me as if they were seeing an apparition. A hero. A monster.
Chapter 5
“They’ve gone,” said Lieutenant Frede, her voice hollow with fatigue and pain. She was on the ground, propping herself up on one elbow, her face smeared, her legs soaked with blood. And a pistol gripped so tightly in her hand that even her glove seemed ghost white.
“Dead,” muttered a standing soldier. “All of them.”
“You killed them,” Sergeant Manfred said. His right arm hung limply from his shoulder. That side of his face was burned black.
“We killed them,” I said. “Or drove them off.”
The sky was brightening from gray to pale blue. The sun would be up in a few moments. Gray smoke drifted in the air, acrid, stinging.
Frede rolled herself over to a sitting position. She was surrounded by bodies, ours and the more massive corpses of the Skorpis.
“
The others who could still stand clustered around me. I was their savior, their hero. But also something of a maniac, a killing machine, a mindless merciless slaughterer. Hardened soldiers though they were, they were filled with admiration for my battle prowess, true enough, but also with something almost approaching fear.
“All right,” I said, trying to break their mood and get them back to normal, “let’s get the wounded tended to. Where’s Vorl? We’ve got to report to the fleet.”
“She’s gone,” said one of the soldiers. “Grenade.”
I pointed to the six least-injured men and women and told them they were the medical detail. Six others I put to checking out what was left of our camp, what supplies were undamaged. I myself tried to use the comm unit in my helmet to raise the fleet.
I got little more than static for my efforts. Which puzzled me. It could not be Skorpis jamming, not now that they were all killed or retreating. Unless they had set up automated jammers. That meant we would have to go through the woods searching—
“I hear you, Orion.” Aten’s voice was strong and clear. It seemed to be inside my mind, rather than coming through my earphones. “Pull down your visor.”
I did as he commanded, and his image took form before my eyes. He was still in his splendid white and gold uniform, but he looked grimly unhappy.
“A huge enemy battle fleet appeared out of subspace and surprised our fleet. Most of our ships were destroyed, the others have fled.”
“Fled?” I yelped.
“They were vastly outnumbered, Orion. They had to leave the area or be wiped out.”
“But what about us? What about our support?”
“You and your assault team are on your own until the fleet can regroup and return to Lunga.”
“How can you expect us—” But my question was too late. His image winked out. He was gone.
I slid my visor up and saw that my troopers were going about the tasks I had assigned them. None of them had heard my conversation with Aten. It was as if I had been in another dimension, walled off from them, while I spoke with the self-styled Golden One.
