The Year’s Best Military SF & Space Opera (13 page)

The crew muttered negatives.

“Then let’s get moving,” Ladd said. “And keep an effing lid on it.”

Amelia was already heading away from the group, her back ramrod straight in disgust, her legs making strong, swirling strides through the muck and water. Adrenaline warred with hesitation. Anger brought with it a certain bravado, that would drain away very quickly. She’d surprised them. She wouldn’t be able to surprise them again. Her only choice was to try to prove to them—and to herself—that they still had value
as soldiers.
That they could make the mantis aliens
pay
for daring to attack another human world.

One by one, the others fell in line, Ladd hauling up the rear.

They slog-marched for almost an hour, nobody saying much, eyes and ears wide open, looking for any hint of trouble. The sky grew brighter and brighter, until the first rays began to peak over the far horizon. The mantes could be anywhere in this morass, waiting to spring. That much was certain. But the crew was small, and if they put their minds to it, they could move quickly when they wanted to.

Eventually, Ladd called for a break. None of them had rested much during the night. All eyes were growing dim and weary.

Chief Schumann clutched her pilot’s rifle tightly and continued to brood, standing in the water, until the strong, gauntlet-clad hand of Sergeant Ladd gripped her shoulder. She turned her head and found herself face to face with the older man.

“That was a good thing you did back there,” Ladd said warmly, a smile on his face. “I was wondering when you were going to pull yourself out of your sulking.”

“I only wish I felt as strong as I talked,” Amelia replied glumly, eyes avoiding Ladd’s smiling face. “Christ, Sergeant, I don’t know what the hell I’m doing here.”

“Listen,” Ladd interrupted, “I know you feel like scum for what happened. You were muttering every detail in your dreams. But these guys are starting to get a different angle on you. And frankly, so am I.”

“Thanks, Sergeant,” Amelia replied honestly.

“Right,” Ladd said, squeazed her shoulder again, then dropped back into the group. Amelia watched him go, a silent
thank you
in her mind.

The scent was
hot.

The mantes and their group leader slipped easily through the trees to the clear patch of shallows where the human smell was strongest. Here, the bipedal aliens—with their clumsy weapons and cheap, artificial carapaces—had stopped for some purpose. The group leader swept outward from the middle of the shallows, seeking the new direction of the trail, and quickly found what he wanted. An unvoiced computer message flowed from the group leader’s disc, and that message was heard by the others. The command simply said,
follow me!
And the horde of praying-mantis-like cyborg creatures shot forward into the trees once again, sensing that their quarry was not far away.

The group leader eventually dispatched a scout to snoop ahead—the scout’s natural pedator’s senses combining with his artificial carriage-enabled awareness to ferret out the humans. It wouldn’t be long now. The group leader wondered what it would be like to kill one of the aliens. Mantes had done it before, on other worlds. Long ago. Would humans die easily? Or die hard?

The group leader grew anxious to find out.

Private Wang Li had relieved his comrade at the rear of the little column, and slogged through the water, grunting at the weight of his automatic rifle and cursing the partly-cloudy sky. Though Li dreaded the thought of face-to-beak combat—for which he’d received what he thought was minimal training—he also hated the never-ending anticipation. Waiting was always the worst part of anything unpleasant.

Then, unexpectedly, Wang got his wish. Looking over his shoulder, he realized he was staring at one of the enemy. The creature had maneuvered stealthily through the trees, using its flying saucer to stay above the water, such that nothing was heard. Until now, suddenly, it was too late.

An instant of alarmed recognition passed—human to mantis.

Aiming his weapon from the hip, Private Li flicked off the safety and squeezed the trigger. For the first time since Initial Entry Training, Li felt his weapon feed round after round through the firing chamber. No brass casings were ejected. None were needed on Li’s space-age rifle. Both the propellant and the soft casing were vaporized the instant the firing pin punctured the thin wall separating the two halves of the propellant proper.

Spouts of water flew up around the lone mantis. Several rounds impacted solidly on the creature’s disc, causing metal and sparks to fly.

Amelia froze, as all around, her rifles began to belch propellant and bullets in every concievable direction. The hammering noise of the guns was only bested by the incoherently terrified cries of the crew.

A chortling
WHAM-WHAM-WHAM
could be heard as Corporal Powell churned up the water with his powerful squad gun, which fired a larger, more potent shell. The lone mantis was burst into fragments of alien gore and splintered machinery that fanned outward and splashed into the water.

“Cease fire! Cease fire!” Ladd yelled.

All of them crept toward the remains of the mantis that drifted in the foamy water. It was the first time any of them had seen the enemy up close and in person. Private Li himself was in a near-daze, his chest heaving mightily and his eyes bugged out so far, Amelia thought they were going to pop from their sockets.

Then, the noise of the mantis soldier’s commrades could be heard. The humming sound of multiple discs far off in the trees, but growing louder as they grew closer.

“Must have signalled the rest of his squad,” Ladd said, watching in the direction from which the noise came.

“How many?” Chief Schumann asked, her pilot’s rifle leveled from her shoulder, but the barrel wavering just slightly as adrenaline made her arms shake.

“Damned if I know,” Ladd said. “Everybody get behind a tree and shoot at the first mantis you see!”

When no one moved—their eyes still transfixed on the alien gore that drifted in the water—Amelia hissed, “Do what the Sergeant says! Go!”

Seven humans slipped behind fat tree trunks as several disc-riding mantes came into view. They moved over the water—the liquid beneath each disc making strange patterns that swirled and distorted according to whatever force it was which kept the discs in the air. None of the aliens spoke, nor made any sound. Their instect-like eyes and heads scanned furiously. Until they saw what was left of their commrade.

At which point both Chief Schumann and Sergeant Ladd shouted for the group to open fire, and again the air was filled with the ear-splitting reports of rifles. Only, this time, it wasn’t just human bullets chewing up the scene. Mantis rounds smacked and popped against tree trunks, bursting off great splinters of bark and wood. Amelia flatted behind her own tree as at least a dozen mantis rounds chewed into it. She almost fell to her knees, she was so instantly petrified.

But when she peered to the side and saw Sergeant Ladd still up, and still firing, she forced herself to mimic him, peeking around her tree and popping off shots at the mantes as they scattered between the trunks. At least three of the mantes appeared down, their discs half subermged into the water and their exposed upper thoraxes split open, with fresh mantis ooze pouring from the lethal wounds.

Amelia felt a sudden, almost insane surge of pride. If she’d been unable to fight back in orbit, at least down here, humans could successfully defend themselves. That the aliens had fallen at all suddenly gave the mantes a mortal quality which they’d lacked before, in Chief Schumann’s mind. Amelia remembered a line from a very, very old two-dee motion picture entertainment she’d once seen.
If it bleeds, we can kill it.

Though fictional, the two-dee movie seemed oddly appropriate, given Amelia’s present circumstances.

But then the firefight turned nasty. The remaining mantes ringed the humans, and suddenly everyone was shooting at everyone else. Human had to be wary of shooting at human, while attempting to shoot at the mantes, and suddenly the picket ship’s crew were diving from behind their trees, risking exposure to enemy fire while they tried to regroup. Lacking the kind of concentrated squad-level maneuvering skills a proper infantry element might possess, the crew was quickly routed, and sent fleeing east—for their very lives.

Amelia ran fastest of all.

The tactical group leader held his force back, letting the humans go. The patrol had lost five of their number, having achieved no significant human casualties that the group leader could detect.

Except for one.

The human who lay in the water was not dead. Not yet. He dragged himself along, clearly wounded in the leg, and trailing a thick plume of human blood behind him as he want. The tactical group leader called his fellows to him and together they hovered over the human, who’d thrown away his weapon when it became empty of ammunition.

The group leader pointed with a serrated forelimb at the bleeding human and said—in the silent carriage-to-carriage language of his kind—
Observe here, the enemy of our people. An animal. Vermin. We are here on this planet to pave the way. Soon, the Quorum of the Select will launch the Fourth Expansion, and evey human on every world will fall to us. Wherever they may be. Look at this one, and remember. Remember how easily they die.

With that, the group leader dipped the leading edge of its carriage, scooped the screaming, bleeding human up—serrated forelimbs holding the squirming human fast—and began to feed.

After many minutes of frantic flight, Amelia heard Corporal Powell ordering them all to stand down. Amelia was so exhausted, she literally sank to her knees and panted, eyes staring into the murky water. Her ears thundered with the beats of her own heart, and she would have gotten back up and run some more, if not for the fact that she simply couldn’t get enough oxygen into her blood to make her muscles work.

A minute later, Powell’s voice prodded her.

“Ma’am?” He said in a half-worried tone. “Are you hurt? Ma’am?”

Amelia didn’t respond. She just turned her eyes this way and that, counting bodies as they crouched behind tries, faces flushed and mouths open, taking in great gulps of air.

“Sergeant Ladd?” she said. “Where is the sergeant??”

One by one, she met their eyes, and very quickly she realized the truth. He’d not made it. When they’d broken cover and run, she’d heard someone yell in pain. She hadn’t realized it was him. Of all the people to fall, it had to be the one troop upon whom Amelia felt she could rely with any degree of security.

She let her chin hit her chest, and closed her eyes against the gentle sob that was trying to tear itself out of her.

The tactical group was thin now. The leader became worried. He had lost almost half his attacking force in the melee with the humans. At the cost of many, his group had destroyed only one of the enemy. And while the feast had been glorious—what a thrill to devour human meat!—the present casualty ratio was not going to yield a successful end to the chase. New tactics would have to be employed. The humans had not gone far. But the water and abundant life forms of the wetlands made it difficult to distinguish the humans from their surroundings. If the group leader sent out a scout, would the scout be any more successful than his fallen sibling? The humans might have been few, but they were heavily armed—something else the tactical group leader had not expected. For a moment, he considered the idea of calling in reinforcements.

It was the logical thing to do. If the humans had proven much more difficult to deal with than expected, overwhelming force would be best. It had worked in orbit. Already, the tactical group leader knew that almost every human craft had been destroyed, or forced to land, whereupon the occupants were slaughtered.

Still, even mantes had their pride.

No. The group leader knew he just needed to be more patient. Calling for help at this stage would be a sign to his superiors that he was not fit for his station. A warrior did not cry for assistance at the first sign of difficulty! A warrior adapted, and overcame.

Using his silent contact with his troops, the group leader dispensed a series of new instructions.

Chief Schumann and her crew dragged themselves from the water and flopped onto their backs at the bank of a small stream filtering into the wetland. At last, they had found truly solid ground. Having spent almost all of their duty time where it was dry and clean—Fleet spaceships and space stations being fastidiously neat and orderly—being put through the hell of the swamp march had almost taken the the life out of them. They lay or curled on the solid ground, dragging in breath, eyes unfocused; and practically pushed to the point of uncaring.

Amelia’s body felt leaden from the forced march. They had only traveled a handful of kilometers, but it felt as if she had walked the circumference of the entire planet. Most pilots had to be in better-than-average shape to pass the standard flight and Fleet physicals. But nothing had prepared her for this. Her body was chafed raw where the flight armor had rubbed against skin, and her legs and feet and thighs were a quivering chorus of agony.

She rolled over and muttered something about the satellite dish.

“I’ve got it,” Private Li said. “I almost dropped it a few times. But it’s our only way to talk to Fleet now.”

Off in the distance, a new noise: the whine-and-thunderclap of hostile ship’s guns could be heard. Only, this time they were firing in-atmosphere. Amelia was just curious enough to crawl her way across the ground to where a pile of half-rotten logs gave her a little elevation. Across the hard ground to the south she could see a stupendously large craft sitting on three thick, extended legs. It was ringed with what seemed to be smaller craft. Or cargo containers? Troop pods? Amelia couldn’t be sure. They hugged the side of the mother ship. Occasionally one of the nozzle-like weapons on the ship’s crown swiveled skyward, and blasted a shot into the sky. What the enemy could be shooting at—when Amelia could not even see it herself—was a mystery.