Twenty
After many hours of vicious fighting in the black treacherous tunnels of the nest, Mai Lee’s forces reached the throne room. Inside the battlesuit, she was sweating profusely, despite the continuous gush of cool air coming from the overtaxed air conditioning system. The suit was finally overheating due to the continuous one hundred and ten percent output she had demanded unrelentingly from the reactors. Her haggard eyes, dark with exhaustion, had pressed against the vision scopes until livid welts had almost swollen them shut. Salty perspiration burned her swollen tongue.
“This is it. This has to be it, we’re at the bottom,” she said, striding over a morass of stiffening corpses. The twisted form of a multi-legged hest entangled one of the suit’s claws. Irritably, she shook it loose and flung it onto one of the empty thrones. She eyed the thrones disappointedly.
“Where are the queens? Are you sure there are no deeper levels?” she demanded of a nearby Captain.
The man shook his head, backing away from her in fear.
Her chest-guns tracked him on automatic, and she pondered the trigger lever with a sneer. Then she sighed. Another corpse would do little to help her now. Her troopers had been devastated in any case.
The situation was painfully clear. She had spent her strength against the nest in hopes of killing their queens and thereby breaking the back of her enemy. But the queens had vanished, probably fleeing into deep escape shafts, the entrances buried and carefully hidden. She had broken her own back, not theirs. She had lost all but a few companies of troopers.
The aliens had won.
Rage and frustration took hold of her fully. With a booming roar of intense fury, she drove the battlesuit in great crashing bounds toward the four thrones. She opened fire on the largest of them, letting fly a blue gush of flame as she neared it. Chips and splinters of the throne exploded around the great chamber. Echoing reports rang from the walls with deafening volume. Under the fierce heat of the Gi’s breath, the throne liquefied and ran like wax.
Bounding like a grasshopper, she pounced upon the largest of the thrones like a wolf leaping upon the back of its lumbering prey. Using the titanium claws, she ripped dark molten chunks of resin from it.
Then she saw the entrance to the larvae room. Pale squirming shapes turned their tubular eating orifices in her direction curiously. Inside her suit, a savage grin split her features. Clearly, the queens hadn’t managed to save all their children.
Without hesitation, she strode into the nursery and commenced a most gruesome slaughter. Humping about in mindless panic, the larvae were blasted to fragments, withered by searing flames and ripped apart with merciless metal claws.
When it was over, she had regained some degree of calm. Exiting the nursery, she ordered her remaining troopers back to the lifters.
On the surface she was surprised to see it was dark, the sky lit only by the lurid glare of the smoky fires that still burned among the horkwoods. The condition of the lifters was another shock. During her absence shrades that had been deposited aboard the lifters during the suicidal attacks of the culus squadrons had burst from hiding and taken a grim toll. Most of the pilots and crews were dead. Many of the lifters were badly damaged and inoperable. She led her weary army onto those that were in the best repair and managed to get all her remaining forces airborne. A few squads of battered helicopter gunships joined them as an escort.
On her way into Grunstein, she paused only to circle around the peak where the Zimmermans had made their last stand. She was gratified to see nothing move other than the blue cloaks of dead men, stirred by the ceaseless mountain winds. The entire crown of the mountain was choked with bodies. The blackened muzzles of the artillery pieces pointed at the skies, like the sightless eyes of the dead.
She put the battlesuit into standby mode, letting the engines idle. The external vents opened, puffing out moist hot air and sucking in the fresh thin air of the night.
She smiled again to herself. She had lost this chance for victory, but her enemies had suffered greatly as well. Indeed, the Zimmermans had paid the ultimate price of obstructing her path.
“How should I set our course, Empress?” inquired the wing commander politely.
The chest guns snapped to target him, still on automatic. He stiffened, his ingratiating smile fading.
“We fly to the Grunstein Interplanetary Spaceport,” answered Mai Lee. “It is time that we left Garm.”
“I think he’s getting heavier somehow,” grumbled Bili, struggling to keep his corner of Zimmerman’s makeshift stretcher aloft with his one good arm.
Sarah, taxed beyond making a reply, concentrated solely on putting her right foot ahead of her left. They progressed with agonizing slowness. Behind them walked the tall silent form of the skald, holding up the rear of the stretcher. She wondered what they would have done without his strange but strong presence.
Irritatingly, Zimmerman was awake and talkative, although reputedly unable to walk. “It’s not much further now. If there’s any way we can all pick up the pace here, our odds of surviving the night would be greatly increased.”
Sarah halted. The others bumped to a stop. Her limbs trembled with exertion and anger. Turning her head, she glared down into Zimmerman’s face. “We would all make a lot better time if we dropped you right here.”
“Ah, but that wouldn’t be prudent,” said Zimmerman with a knowing smile. With an expression of sudden alarm, he raised up his head and peered into the dark forest that surrounded them. “What was that?”
“What?” asked Bili, looking concerned. He eyed the forest with the distrust he had gained ever since seeing the digging alien after the crash.
“Could that have been a landshark?” asked Zimmerman. “They prowl this area all the time you know.”
Sarah watched this fear-provoking performance with dull awe. How could the man be so relentlessly selfish and manipulative?
She leaned close, hissing into his face. “Knock it off or so help me, I’ll drop you right here and you can crawl out. We may not make it, but you’ll be dead for sure.”
Zimmerman gasped and took on a look of great pain. He raised a hand weakly and closed his eyes. “Wait a moment, the hole that monster punched into my thigh is causing another spasm.”
Sarah just glared at him, unimpressed even if his pain was real.
“Look now, everyone. I’m very sorry to be such a burden. I really regret every bite of excess food I’ve ever indulged in right now, believe me. But if we can pull together, if we can stick it out, we’ll all survive.”
“Save it,” grunted Sarah, grimly taking a new grip on the pole and stumbling forward into the dark trees.
Zimmerman wisely fell silent for a time. Trudging forward, exhausted and injured, Sarah thought that this march had to be the worst experience of her life. Not for the first time, she reflected that the luck of her family had gone bad at the point of her husband’s accident. It was as if she were in a deep well of bad luck, where she and Bili spiraled ever downward until now it seemed that the light at the top of the shaft had all but vanished entirely.
Utilizing reserves she didn’t know she possessed, she eventually reached the outcropping of rocks that Zimmerman had said to keep an eye out for. At that point, he directed them to proceed downhill into a steep gully. The sides of the gully were wet and slick with moss. They almost lost hold of Zimmerman and pitched him squalling onto the rocks before reaching the bottom.
“Over there, under the tangle-bush. There should be a cave mouth,” hissed Zimmerman, hushed now that their goal was so near. There was a genuine, feverish excitement in his voice.
They set down the stretcher and Sarah went forward to investigate. Using a hand-held glow-lamp they had taken from a fallen trooper on the way out of the nest, she examined the walls of the gully closely. After a time she discovered the entrance.
“There’s no way a flitter could fit inside that hole,” she said, returning to Zimmerman. She directed the glow-lamp, set at its highest setting, into his sweating, dirty face.
He squinted and waved at the light in irritation. “Just take me inside. I’ll show you.”
Grudgingly, she obliged. Inside, the cave was quite a bit larger than it appeared. Although she saw no immediate signs of the flitter, she did see numerous familiar-looking bales of bluish reeds. Along one wall were
