I shrugged as she sprayed a bandage onto my lacerated hand. “I suppose I’m a new model. The first of a new breed.”
She gave me a suspicious stare.
“Well, the important thing is that we beat them off,” I said, trying to sound cheerful.
She still looked doubtful.
Outside her medical tent I saw Sergeant Manfred waiting for treatment. His face was nicked and one arm roughly bandaged with a blood-soaked rag.
“We beat them off,” I repeated to him.
“They’re still out there,” he said somberly, with the flat assurance of a veteran. “That was just a probe. They’ll be back. Tonight, most likely.”
Chapter 4
Humans are diurnal creatures. We sleep in darkness and are active during the daylight hours. The Skorpis, my briefings had informed me, were descended from felines. They were nocturnal. All the more reason why our night landing made no sense. All the more reason to believe that Manfred was right; the next Skorpis attack would be at night.
I wanted to be prepared for it, but I was caught on the horns of a dilemma. The more men I put to guarding our perimeter, the fewer were available to assemble the matter transceiver. Without the transceiver we could not get the heavy weapons and sensors that we needed to make our makeshift base reasonably secure from attack.
We had one heavy weapon: the pair of antimissile lasers that, once assembled, could knock missiles out of the sky at ranges far enough to protect us from nuclear warheads. Or so the briefing tapes claimed. I shuddered at the thought of having nuclear weapons used against us. Apparently the high command had the same fear: hence the antimissile system. Our orders were to assemble it first, which we had very happily set out to do.
I gambled and put as many of the troops on the assembly task as possible. That meant roughly half of them. More would simply get in each other’s way. The others guarded the perimeter while the construction job—heavy lasers and transceiver—hurried along.
I walked the perimeter myself, studying the landscape, searching for whatever advantages I could find in the natural fall of the terrain. If I had not been so preoccupied I might have enjoyed the afternoon. The forest was actually quite beautiful, the trees tall and straight and stately, the sunlight filtering through the leafy canopy so high up above dappling the ground with patches of brightness. Colorful birds swooped among the trees; insects buzzed and chirped. I even saw a few small furry things scampering across the mossy ground and climbing up the tree trunks. Too small to be one of Intelligence’s tree lemurs, I thought.
I saw no sign of the Skorpis or any other enemies. Not a spent power pack, not a footprint on the soft ground. Several of the trees were singed or scratched from shrapnel, but that might just as easily have been from our own firing as the enemy’s. For all the traces they left, the Skorpis might as well have been figments of our imagination.
But I did see something that interested me. A broad shallow gully that ran from a nearby stream toward the center of our base. A natural pathway aimed directly at the heart of our encampment. A stealthy battalion could crawl along that gully unnoticed by soldiers on either side of it, especially at night with a firefight going full bore. It had to be guarded, blocked.
Or maybe not. I began to wonder if the Skorpis had already scouted the area and noted the gully. Perhaps when they attacked—tonight, if Manfred was right—they would send a team to probe this sunken highway. If they found it undefended, they might send the main force of their attack along its length, to erupt deep inside our perimeter and shatter our defenses.
That’s what I would do if I were in their place. Now how could I turn it into a trap?
I started back toward our lines, my head buzzing with ideas.
My three lieutenants were skeptical.
“Invite them to push along the gully?” Lieutenant Vorl asked, her voice high with anxiety. “Let them penetrate our perimeter?”
We were in my bubble tent, squatting on the plastic floor like a quartet of Neolithic tribesmen. Again I was struck by the physical similarities among the officers. Sandy hair, freckles, sky blue eyes. Their skin was a light tan, almost golden, as if blended from all the races of Earth. Vorl and Frede could have almost been twin sisters. Quint, my second-in-command, their brother.
“We don’t have the manpower to hold the entire perimeter against them,” I said. “And we need another six hours before the blasted transceiver is operational. If we can trap a major part of their force and annihilate them, we might be able to break their attack and stay alive long enough to get the transceiver working.”
“What about reinforcements?” Quint asked.
I turned to Vorl, my communications officer.
“No reinforcements,” she said sullenly. “I worked my request all the way up to the admiral, and the damned lizard turned us down cold.”
“We have to hold on until the transceiver starts bringing in the heavy weapons,” I said, for about the twentieth time.
“But
“I agree,” said Quint. “It goes against standard tactical doctrine.”
“Lieutenant Frede, what’s your opinion?” I asked.
She shook her head, said nothing.
“All right, then,” I said. “Three against and one in favor. The ayes have it.”
They looked surprised, almost angry. But they took my orders without further grumbling. We spent the hours of twilight setting up our perimeter defenses and mining the gully. I placed a weak screen of automated rifles about a third of the way down the gully, just to give the enemy the impression that the gully was not totally unguarded. I did not want them to discover that they were in a trap until it was too late for them to escape. At the end of the gully, a scant fifty meters from the edge of the transceiver itself, I placed ten of the steadiest troops with Sergeant Manfred. If the enemy reached that far, they had to hold them until the rest of us could come to their aid.
All work on assembling the transceiver had to stop when it became truly dark. We needed every soldier on guard, and I did not want our work lights to illuminate the area for the enemy. Not that they needed illumination. True to their feline heritage, the Skorpis could see quite well in darkness that would seem total to a human.
At least we had the antimissile lasers up and working. If the enemy tried to take us out with a missile attack, we were ready for them. I hoped.
Waiting was the toughest thing of all. The night was dark. No moon, and thick low clouds scudding across the distant twinkling stars. The biting insects swarmed at us again, making everyone miserable. Voices hooted out of the woods, night birds clacked and chirped with almost mechanical regularity. Now and then something would give out a weird, high-pitched howl.
Nothing bigger than a tree lemur had been identified on Lunga, I reminded myself. But those howls sounded as if something quite large was making them.
We scratched at our bug bites and grumbled and waited.
I was hunkered down in a shallow dugout a few meters to the right of the gully, in full armor—dented legging and all. My rifle rested on the sill of upturned earth in front of me. My belt and webbing were studded with grenades and spare power packs. Pistol on my hip, combat knife in my boot. I thought again of the dagger that Odysseus had given me; I missed its comforting presence, but it would have been of scant use strapped against my thigh, beneath my armor.
The sensors in my visor showed a tranquil forest. No sign of the enemy. I even saw an actual tree lemur, or something very like one, climbing slowly down one of the trunks, staring in my direction with enormous eyes, and then working its way back up the trunk until it finally disappeared into the foliage high above.
