I let them work until we had sorted out our situation, keeping the news of the fleet’s abandonment to myself for the time being. Before anything else, I had to know what shape the troop was in.
The situation was bleak. Of our original hundred, forty-six had been killed and a further twenty-two so badly wounded that they expected to be sent back to the fleet as soon as a medical evacuation ship could reach us. Of the thirty-two remaining, all of us had suffered wounds of various severity, although we could still stand and fight. The only one among us to have gotten through the battle unscratched was Lieutenant Quint. I wondered about that.
Frede was in serious shape, both her legs smashed by a grenade. It would take a week or more for the automated medical regenerators to repair her shattered bones and rebuild the flesh. Others were just as bad off, and we did not have enough regeneration equipment to handle them all.
Sergeant Manfred’s shoulder was badly burned, but aside from a loss of blood he was in walkable condition. I went to the patch of ground where he lay, with two soldiers kneeling over him with a transfusion kit.
“Manfred, you are now a lieutenant,” I told him.
He glared up at me. “Sir, I don’t want to be a lieutenant. I’m a noncom.”
“You’re a lieutenant, Manfred, until I can get someone else to head Vorl’s squad. You will behave like a lieutenant and the squad will treat you like a lieutenant. End of discussion.”
Clearly unhappy, he mumbled, “Yes, sir.”
“How long will this transfusion take?” I asked one of the troopers.
She squinted at the readout numbers. “Nine minutes, sir.”
“Lieutenant Manfred, there will be an officers’ meeting in fifteen minutes, where my tent used to be. Report to me there.”
“Yessir.”
Both the troopers were grinning at him.
It was a pitiful officers’ meeting. Manfred’s shoulder and face were covered with spray bandages. Frede sat with her legs poking straight out, encased in regenerator packs up to the hips. And Quint looked strangely uneasy, as if he thought he ought to be wounded somewhere, too.
I had several nicks and burns on my arms, legs, and face, but nothing that required more than a smear of protein salve and a bit of time.
“What’s the supply situation?” I asked Quint.
He took a deep breath. “Not good, at the moment. Practically everything was destroyed in the fighting. We have enough food on hand for three days, max. We’re down to a dozen spare power packs. And the medical supplies are already stretched to the limit. We need more regenerators, especially. And fresh tents, cots, clothing, replacements for damaged body armor—”
“That’s enough,” I said. “I get the picture.”
“When does the medevac ship arrive?” Frede asked.
“It doesn’t,” I said.
“What do you mean? We’ve got wounded here we can’t even treat properly! They’ve got to be lifted back to the fleet.”
“There isn’t any fleet. They were jumped by a superior force and had to retreat.”
“They ran away?” Quint’s eyes went so wide I could see white all around them. “They’ve left us here and run away?”
“That’s the situation,” I said. “We’re on our own.”
It took several seconds for them to absorb the bad news. Frede and Quint stared at each other.
“Those goddamned lizards,” Quint muttered.
Frede looked down at her encased legs. “I never did trust them, the cold-blooded bastards.”
Manfred nodded to himself, as if he had expected nothing less. I was struck by the difference in looks between Manfred and the two lieutenants. The features of his face were sharper, harder. A hawk’s beak for a nose, narrow eyes of dark brown, almost black. Thick bristles of black hair, cropped close to the skull. Even his skin was different from theirs, swarthier, stretched tight over his jutting cheekbones.
“We’re going to die here,” Quint whispered.
Manfred almost smiled. “What’s the difference? If the fleet had taken us back they would’ve just put us back in cryo storage.”
Quint glared at him. “You can be revived from cryo storage, soldier, sooner or later.”
“Sure,” said Manfred, “when they’re ready to let us die for them.”
“That’s treasonous talk!”
“Hold on,” I said. “We’re not dead yet, and I won’t have my officers squabbling.” Turning to Manfred, I added, “Not even my new officers.”
“Sorry, sir,” he muttered. To me, not to Quint.
Frede asked, “If we only have a few days’ rations and no prospect of resupply from the fleet, what chance do we have?”
“There’s a Skorpis base on this planet,” I replied. “They have plenty of food there.”
“Raid the Skorpis base?”
“That’s suicide!” Quint insisted.
I gave him a wintry smile. “Would you rather die fighting or starve to death?”
Manfred said, “Sir, with all due respect, that Skorpis base is on the other side of the planet. It’ll take a helluva lot more than a few days to get there. What do we live on in the meantime?”
“We live off the land,” I said. “Our briefings said that the local vegetation and animals are edible. Some of them, at least.”
“What about our wounded?” Frede asked. “Some of them can’t travel.”
I said, “We can’t leave the wounded here. They’d starve to death. And the Skorpis will probably come back; they still want to knock out our transceiver, I’m sure.”
“Even without the fleet here to send us supplies?”
“The fleet might sneak a supply ship through, sooner or later. That’s what the Skorpis must be thinking right now. They’ll be back to finish the job.”
Frede scowled at me. “So instead of waiting for them to attack us here you want to take all of us halfway across the planet and attack them in their stronghold?”
“If we wait for them here we’ll be sitting ducks. I’d much prefer that they didn’t know where we are.”
Quint shook his head. “What difference does it make? We’re dead anyway.”
“That’s the spirit,” I said disgustedly.
The sudden whining hum of the antimissile lasers made all four of us look up. The lasers were powering up, swiveling, pointing skyward.
“Something’s coming in,” I said, scrambling to my feet.
The lasers fired, the crack of their capacitor banks sharp enough to hurt my ears. Seconds later we heard the dull rumble of an explosion, like thunder rolling in the distance. Another crack from the lasers, and then another clap of thunder, closer.
“This base is nothing more than a target now,” I said. “We’ve got to get out of here.”
None of them argued.
Battered, patched and bandaged, we gathered ourselves and what was left of our supplies and started the long trek through an unknown country toward the stronghold of our enemy. I led our vanguard, twelve of our least-wounded troopers. The twenty other relatively healthy men and women formed a guard around the flanks and rear of our wounded. All of us glided a meter or so above the ground on our flight packs. What was left of our supplies we carried along on the flight packs of our dead comrades.
We left their bodies at the base. It was a hard decision. Normally a troop cares for the bodies of its slain soldiers as well as possible, freezing them in cryo units when they can, in the hope that they can be repaired and eventually revived. Even if not, the bodies are treated with respect and eventually cremated with honors.
We could not bring the bodies of our forty-six dead with us; we simply did not have the strength for it. And besides, I figured that they would soon be cremated in a nuclear fireball. The Skorpis had tried to seize our base with their warriors and failed. Now they were determined to obliterate the base without risking further casualties.
