They have to attack tonight, I told myself. They want to knock out the transceiver before we get it operational. It makes no sense for them to wait until—
“Some movement in fourth sector,” I heard a sergeant’s guarded whisper in my earphones.
That was off to my left. I peered across the gully and into the trees out there. I could see nothing.
But when I swung my head back I saw a flicker of movement among the trees directly in front of me. They’re out there, I told myself. Getting ready to hit us.
What if they use nukes? I had pondered that question all day. The transceiver components were shielded; nothing short of a direct hit would damage them. Our body armor could absorb a lot of punishment and protect us from radiation. But a tactical nuclear grenade could kill most of us very quickly and allow the enemy to walk in and dismantle the transceiver by hand, if they wanted to. We had no defense against tactical nukes.
Nor did we have any nukes of our own. Our mission was basically logistical, not attack. If anyone started throwing nukes around, it would be the enemy and we would be fried meat.
I saw more movement out among the trees. Of course, we had the automated antimissile lasers. They had been the first package we had set up. They could track a missile and zap it within microseconds, although how well they could track through the heavy canopy of the trees was a question I wondered about. Could they pick up a grenade at short range and destroy it? I doubted that.
Suddenly half the world lit up and a terrific roar shook the ground. My visor sensors overloaded and turned off. With my unaided eyes I saw that they had fired a barrage of rocket grenades at us, roaring in low to the ground, flat trajectories. Our antimissile lasers fired and blew away several of them in brilliant blossoms of flame.
Every sergeant tried to report in at once. The Skorpis were attacking around half the perimeter, charging forward into our guns.
And then they were hitting my sector, too. They came rushing out of the woods, firing and bellowing earsplitting battle cries. I grabbed my rifle and started shooting back. They were big, I could see that even at this distance, huge and heavily muscled with cat’s eyes that glowed fiercely in the light of the battle.
I ducked down for a moment and worked the antimissile override controls on my wrist. Depressing the lasers to fire horizontally, I started them sweeping the woods with their heavy beams. My troops knew enough to keep down, stay flattened on the ground. The Skorpis walked into those powerful beams as they advanced. I saw them sliced in half, heads vaporized, trees blasted into flame. They dropped down to their bellies; their advance stopped.
We peppered them with our grenades. I saw white-hot shrapnel shredding the ground were they lay. But they did not retreat. They inched toward us, crawling on their bellies, dying and being horribly torn up by our fire but still coming at us, inexorably, relentlessly, like an unstoppable tide.
And the alarm on my other wrist tingled. Glancing to my left I saw that the automated laser rifles in the gully had found something to shoot at. Whole squads of Skorpis were slithering down the gully, just as I thought they would. The attacks on our perimeter were merely holding actions designed to keep our attention away from the gully.
Merely holding actions. Humans and Skorpis were dying all along our perimeter. The forest was in flames now. Rockets whizzed through the scorching air. Explosions shook the ground. Laser beams flicked and winked everywhere in a crazy crossfire. Men yelled and screamed at the enemy, who bellowed and roared back at us.
And the main weight of their attack was slithering down the gully. They were past the screen of automated rifles now, thinking that they had put the gully’s defenders to rout. They were moving faster now, crawling on their hands and knees, almost to the point where Manfred and his ten would have to stop them.
I jammed my thumb on the stud that set off the mines. The whole gully erupted in a tremendous blast of flame and billowing dirt and smoke. I saw bodies hurled into the air, silhouetted against the flaming trees, and parts of bodies, too.
For a stunned instant everything went quiet. Absolutely still. Or was it that the shattering, overpowering roar of that explosion had simply deadened my ears?
“They’re coming at us again!” It sounded like Lieutenant Vorl, who was stationed halfway around the perimeter from where I was. And, sure enough, more Skorpis were pushing forward toward my position, staying low to avoid the heavy laser fire, but still advancing toward us.
“Fall back,” I said into my helmet mike. “Fall back and tighten up our perimeter.” With a smaller circumference to cover we could intensify our fire.
For what seemed like hours we inched back and the Skorpis crawled forward. There was no end of them. I saw hundreds of their bodies sprawled in death all around us, yet their comrades still pressed forward, relentless, unheeding. My rifle became too hot to fire; it just refused to work. I pushed it aside and drew my pistol.
“Piss on it,” muttered a trooper at my side.
I thought he was having trouble with his rifle, too.
“Piss on it,” he repeated, adding, “sir.”
And he demonstrated what he meant. With laser beams zipping scant millimeters over our heads, he wormed his penis out of his pants and armor and urinated on the coils of his rifle. Then he flattened onto his belly and resumed firing at the Skorpis.
“Cools the coils, sir,” he said, without taking his eyes off the advancing enemy. “That’s one advantage we men have over the women. Sir.”
So I pissed on my rifle and got it working again, feeling slightly embarrassed in the back of my mind but glad to have the rifle functioning once more.
We were being forced back toward the heart of our camp. The Skorpis were evidently willing to spend as many of their warriors as they had to in order to destroy us. This was not a battle of attrition; it was a battle of annihilation. Either we wiped them out or they wiped us out.
Like all battles, though, there came a lull. We had fallen back to a tight little ring around the camp. Most of our bubble tents had been shot to shreds and the antimissile lasers had taken several blasts, but the screens around the transceiver were holding up. So far. The fires that we had started among the trees around our original perimeter had mostly died away now, although the air was still filled with a smoky, woody redolence.
I called my lieutenants together to see how we stood. We met in a muddy crater blown into the ground by a rocket grenade. Casualties were serious, but our weapons were still functioning; we had plenty of spare power packs for them. We were almost out of grenades, though.
“Report our situation to the fleet commander,” I told Lieutenant Vorl. She edged away from the rest of us, opened up the wrist of her armor and started tapping on the keyboard set inside.
“The transceiver’s still intact,” I summed up, “but we can’t afford to retreat any further. They’re almost within hand-grenade range of the equipment now.”
“The screens will still protect the equipment,” said Lieutenant Quint.
“Yeah, but not us,” Frede grumbled.
“It’s only another hour or so until dawn,” Quint said. “According to Intelligence, the Skorpis almost always break off their attacks when daylight comes up.”
“And Intelligence has been a hundred percent on everything so far, haven’t they?” Frede countered.
“It’s the ‘almost always’ that worries me,” I said. “They seem willing to fight to the last man.”
“Theirs or ours?”
“Whichever comes first.”
A laser beam lanced by over our heads. A grenade exploded somewhere.
“They’re starting up again.”
Vorl ducked her head back into our conversation. “Sir, I’m having a difficult time raising the fleet. A lot of interference on every available channel.”
“Jamming?”
“Possibly. Or something’s wrong with the comm equipment.”
“Great,” I muttered. “Just what we need, to be out of touch with the fleet.”
More firing. But none of the sergeants were reporting in, so I assumed nothing major was developing. Not yet.
“How long can we sit here and hold them off?” Quint asked.
