War Against the White Knights (28 page)

And while Gamma Battery was engaged in a desperate struggle for its survival, a portion of the Gliesan unit who had seized the battery’s gun line was using their own firing position to rain mortar bombs down on the Marines of the 87th.

The Gliesans were everywhere. Windows became invitations for the enemy to shoot inside. They could appear at any place at any time. Only the lightness of the Gliesan weapons, and the strength of the Legion battlesuits delayed the inevitable.

But help was on its way, or so thought Knopf’s suit AI, which painted shadowy figures in his head-up display, crawling toward the Gliesans like ghostly beetles. When he switched off the AI enhancements, the figures disappeared, but the distinctive way they clambered and hopped was instantly recognizable as Marines in powered armor.

A series of grenade blasts blew thoughts of a rescue out of Knopf’s mind and sent his body clattering down 30 meters into the room below.

Gamma Battery gathered together their survivors and fought a spirited withdrawal, moving deeper into the walkway until finally the way down was blocked. At the end, they kept the Gliesans at bay by firing grenades up the walkway until their supply finally ran out.

But the final assault to finish off the gunners never came. Instead, Knopf heard the sounds of the Gliesans fighting farther up the walkway, until soon those sounds died away to be replaced by shouts of: “Freedom shall be won!”

The battle for Australia had barely begun, but when the company of Assault Marines from the 87
th
met the survivors of Gamma Battery, the shattered walkway echoed with shouts of jubilation as if the campaign for freedom was finally over.

Knopf slapped a corporal on the back. “Thanks for coming back for us.”

“No problem, pal. Our lieutenant says you’re to tag along with us now.”

“Guess we’re all riflemen now, eh, Knopf?”

Knopf looked over and saw Battery Captain Jones standing beside him, arm hanging uselessly by his side, and an SA-71 cradled in the other.

“No shame in that, sir.”

“Well said, Lance Bombardier. No shame at all. Now, let’s follow these fine people and go find the Battery Commander, while we’re about it. I expect Major Schneider has been wondering where we’ve gotten to.”

“Master, I beg to report with heart-shattering sorrow that the Gliesan counter-attack in Area 217 has been repulsed. The enemy has breached the upper levels.”

General Deeproot-Steadfast did not need to look up from her station to know that Staff-General Ndjaek would be rippling its foul-smelling skin in supplication to its master, but then the obsequious Friokebi were always sycophantic buffoons around the mutant masters. The moment its master was gone, Ndjaek would show its poison-tipped fangs in dealings with the other vassal races.

“No matter,” replied the mutant master. His voice hissed with sibilance, which meant the figure in the command throne had taken his thoughtful form: slime coated, and his back a writhing mass of tentacles. “I had asked the glider troops to buy me fifteen minutes. They won me thirty. They did well.”

This ridiculous performance of sycophancy and dominance made Deeproot-Steadfast’s fur itch. In all of its physical forms, the mutant master had the mental ability to coordinate the activity of scores of subordinates simultaneously, and indeed was doing so with his staff officers. The groveling, the imposing throne finished in polished bone – supposedly taken from the skeletons of favored slaves – and forcing all in his presence to speak aloud in the language native to this moon rather than use far more efficient machine translators – all this was but an act. A performance of dominance. And out there on the battlefield, brave soldiers fought and died for their mutant masters, because long ago their worlds had been forced to sell their distant ancestors as the mutants’ price of protection against the even worse fates possible in this hostile galaxy.

Razor-sharp claws flicked from the tips of the general’s rubbery digits. She retracted them, praying the master had not seen anger get the better of her.

The general’s display screen went blank, to be replaced by a simple but empty message box. Deeproot-Steadfast’s ears flicked back tight against her head as the message text eventually began to scroll lethargically into view.

“Is there a problem, General?”

The author of that death sentence did not need to sign his name.

An overwhelming sense of calm overwhelmed Deeproot-Steadfast, a sign that her hormone-effector implants were preparing her for her fate. The life of a slave soldier could be grim indeed, she told herself, even for a Jotun. But hers had been better than most, and she had retained at least a semblance of honor.

The general rose from her station, walked in front of the throne, and bowed, careful to ensure the protocol of keeping her head lower than her waist. “Master?”

He could hear Staff-General Ndjaek hissing in amusement.

“Rise, General,” commanded the master.

The Jotun general lifted her head and looked into the face of her superior. The mutant had changed into a slender form, almost stick-like. She suspected the master chose the form that most humiliated his subordinates. He was two paces away, and his body so fragile in this mode. A second was all it would take to close the distance and rip the creature’s head off with her strong Jotun arms.

But she knew she would never harm her master. If she made the attempt, she would be dead before ever reaching the seemingly fragile creature. But what bound her even more completely than the futility of an attack, was the foreknowledge that she would never be a danger to the mutant masters. The foreseers did not see every detail of the future but they would surely see a rebellion, even an ineffectual, personal one. If there were futures in which the general acted treasonously, then she would have been executed long ago, and the repercussions of her punishment would be terrible in their severity.

As they did in so many matters, the masters had twisted the foreseers’ ability to see the future into an unbreakable grip on the present. Against such power, no resistance was possible.

The master taunted her with his weakness for a moment before changing to a more aggressive form: red-skinned and hugely muscled. There was no apparent transition from one form to another. The transformation was as instant as it was inexplicable.

“How is your wound healing, General?”

Deeproot-Steadfast felt an echo of pain along her left side where the grenade blast had caught her, in a training exercise of all things. “Healing is on schedule, master.”

“You look fit for duty to me. I’m giving you back your old command. Relieve the CO of the 32
nd
Marine Army and send her back here to take your place. The enemy are preparing their second wave of attacks. The 32
nd
will draw this second wave down through the upper levels. You will conduct a convincing fighting withdrawal that will nonetheless fail. And when the enemy senses you are beaten, and advances with renewed vigor, then I shall activate the coil defense to trap them here until our reinforcements can destroy them piece by piece.” The master mutant’s eyes narrowed and yellowed. “I see you forgot to wear your battlesuit, General. Try not to die too quickly, but do make sure to die. Now, leave me!”

She bowed and backed away before hurrying as best she could to comply. Her mind was so engrossed with the practical details of leading her command one last time, that when she saluted Senior Staff General Scrutineer-Vigilant on her way out, she almost failed to notice the general’s flared-back ears.

Was that a sign of anger, or sympathy? And if Scrutineer-Vigilant had such disloyal thoughts in her head, why had the foreseers not seen them long ago?

Deeproot-Steadfast cast this distracting puzzle from her mind. Such intrigues were for others now. Her fate was set.

“Promise me one thing,” said Remus when the volume of enemy fire pinging off the Lynx’s nose shield grew to a whining crescendo. “Janna?”

The Wolf huddling beside him in the lee of the mini-tank’s protection flung Remus an angry glare, the combat rage adding a demonic red glow behind her green-and-gold-flecked eyes that illuminated the interior of her breathing mask.

“Promise me you’ll stay alive,” he insisted. “For Romulus.”

Janna struggled to regain the power of speech. The berserker craze was almost upon her. “Don’t confuse me,” she snarled. “That’s how to stay alive – by being myself. He’s dead, anyway.”

Remus shook his head. “No, I’d know if Romulus were dead. I don’t mean a fraternal connection that I would tell if it ever severed. I mean every time I push for answers, the authorities always evade. If Rom had been killed–”

“Shut up, and look around!”

Remus bit his tongue. Janna was right: this was no time to discuss Romulus. With a start, he realized that nerves were making him babble. As a former squadron leader he had fought in many battles, but this was the first battle he’d fought on foot.

He also wasn’t used to being out of the command loop. The recon drones were blasting away at the enemy defensive position, where the road turned up ahead before descending down to the next level. What were their probes revealing? As a private soldier in the 7
th
Armored Claw, such information was now far above his pay grade. Were they about to charge the enemy, bloodcurdling battle cries of the Wolves echoing off the ceiling? Or were they about to pull out?

With the last of the New Empire’s outer perimeter mopped up by the Lynx machine gun turrets, the scene calmed. But when Remus looked around at the Wolves, he knew withdrawal was impossible by this point. The 7th Armored Claw was like a powder keg with a fuse already lit and about to blow.

Like many of their generation of the Human Marine Corps, the Wolves were originally bred and engineered to be a terror weapon, but even the geneticists who had designed them couldn’t have imagined how the weapon they had built would combine with the Ginquin skin parasite. It had been a freak accident. Romulus and Remus had been infected by a mother Ginquin who had nuzzled them as babies. When the brothers with their taller physiques, clad with muscle, had grown to be young men – virile youngsters surrounded by admiring young Wolf women, who were not shy about taking what they wanted – the parasite began to spread throughout the Wolf population. Soon, it became a badge of identity, and a ritual of infection was formalized for those Wolves who hadn’t shared rack time with the right people.

All around, Wolf soldiers with wild eyes and bared teeth strained at the leash. Many of them went
sky clad
, stripped to the waist to better display the colorful zigzags and whorls of their armored skin. Many would fight naked if they could, but even Wolves had vulnerabilities in their groins and the soles of their feet where the armor was weak, and they needed equipment boxes, rations, and the breathing masks to guard against the Flek’s poison.

The Wolves most eager for the fight began to edge away from the protective cone of the Lynxes’ shields. A salvo of missiles screamed around the corner and exploded overhead, showering the walls in fragmentation bursts. Those who had strayed from the protection of the Lynxes suffered the most, blown along the ground by the shockwaves. Peppered with shrapnel, they nonetheless shook their heads and picked themselves up. Most of them, anyway.

The six of them behind their Lynx looked okay except… Janna! A vicious shard of ceramalloy rose from her bare skin, just above one breast. She hadn’t even noticed, but he estimated that the shrapnel had embedded an inch or more. He itched to do something – to pull out the fragment and apply a med-patch that would automatically sterilize, seal, and staunch any internal bleeding. But he forced himself to obey his 7
th
Armored Claw retraining, and did nothing. Med-patches were for humans, and the hexagonal plates that covered Janna’s torso in swirls of greens and golds were not human.

He watched her skin reject the foreign body, squeezing out the invader until it fell to the floor. Merde! He’d been wrong. The shard had punctured her body to about the length of his index finger, and Janna hadn’t noticed.

She was amazing. Romulus was one lucky guy to have shared his love with this Wolf girl. Whatever stupid things Rom had done to get in so much trouble, he prayed his brother had not wronged this woman.

A sudden surge of power fueled Remus’s muscles, making him impatient to step out from behind the nose shield of the Lynx and unleash the fury of the SA-75(h) mobile mini-gun with its enormous backpack that would prove too heavy a burden for even the strongest Wolf. Even though Remus was a different variety of human from the Wolves, born centuries later, he had been raised as a Wolf and felt the battle rage infuse him.

He snarled at the soldier operating the mini-tank. The stink of that creature burned in his nostrils, slicing through the fumes of burning and explosives, burrowing underneath the light sprinkling of poisonous Flek, and forcing its way through his breathing filter. Romulus and Remus had been named by Colonel Nhlappo because their birth mothers had been so dismayed by the nightmare world they had brought their babies into, that they had refused to name them, not until such time as they dared to hope that their children had any kind of future. That was the story Momma had taught them, and their birth mothers had been right, because they had died at the hands of that tanker’s stinking people.

Hardits!

Remus raised the barrel of his mini-gun. The cables connecting the stubby barrel with the backpack throbbed with urgent need.

A low growl rumbled at the back of Remus’s throat. It would be so easy. A quick burst of fire, and the Hardit would be a mess of matted fur, soaked in blood. An accident of war.

A massive blow to his temple sent Remus reeling, arms out to keep his balance. He stumbled out of the cone shape that was the mini-tank’s shield, feeling his body ripple as he passed through the invisible barrier. The dropped barrel of his mini-gun dangled by its strap, and made him yelp when it crashed against the inside of his knee.