Steel World (10 page)

What I did see, however, was an imposing range of mountain peaks. The rock cliffs were black and sheer. There were jungle-type growths clinging to the faces of these cliffs. I recalled images I’d seen of volcanic lands back on Earth. The scenery here was similar.

“No enemy in sight—no friendlies, either,” I shouted down.

“Great,” responded Specialist Grant. “We’re probably off-target. What’s your unit, Recruit?”

“I’m in the 3
rd
.”

“The 3
rd
?” she asked, narrowing her pretty eyes. “I’m in the 3
rd
, and I don’t recognize you.”

We soon figured out that we were from entirely different cohorts. All in all, there were three different units represented in the immediate vicinity. We’d all been misplaced.

“All right,” said the specialist after she’d radioed in our position and requested instructions from the command centers. “I’ve heard back from HQ. We’re to proceed to the base of those cliffs. The mining op we’re supposed to be defending is a complex drilled into that black rock mountain. We can meet up and reorganize when we get there.”

I climbed down out of the tree and watched the trees around us for any sign of the enemy.

“Specialist Grant?” I asked.

“What is it, Recruit?”

“Why are we so far off target? Is this normal?”

She shrugged. Like me, she didn’t have heavy armor. Bios were supposed to patch people up, and usually didn’t fight. She did have a large pack on her back, however, which I knew was full of medical gear and supplies.

“Yeah,” she said, “sometimes this happens. There’s a gust of wind, or incoming fire, or a timing error—whatever. The system will group up all the lost capsules in an area and try to land them close to one another, so no one is left alone.”

I counted heads. There were seven of us—plus the splat. There were two light troops, a weaponeer, Anne Grant in command and three recruits, including myself.

Grant looked at me. “Take the point.”

A weaponeer laughed behind me, and I tossed him a glance, realizing he was Specialist Sargon from my own unit. I hadn’t recognized him in his full kit. All the weaponeers looked alike when they were armored and carrying their heavy equipment.

Sargon walked up to me in his grinding armor and put a heavy gauntlet on my shoulder. “Lucky you,” he said.

I shrugged off his hand and turned toward the cliffs. I began walking, rifle ready, eyes wide. I tried to watch everything at once, and to stay in cover whenever I could. That part was easy, because there were a lot of fern-trees handy.

Behind me, the rest of them gathered up and formed a line. They followed me, watching for any sign of the enemy.

We didn’t make it all the way to the cliffs before things became interesting. I came around another tree—this one with a very thick trunk. The whole plant was shaped like a giant pineapple.

As I rounded the spiky trunk, I froze. There were three theropods and several empty drop-pods.

The dinos were huge. I’d seen these before, of course. They were juggers, fifteen feet high and covered in brightly-colored scales. Two were blue and one was sort of a magenta shade. They all wore steel collars encircled with spikes.

As I watched for a moment in shock, the two blue ones dipped their heads down into the drop pods they were standing over. When the muzzles came back up, they dripped with gore.

“Specialist?” I whispered into the local chat channel. “I’ve made contact. Three hostiles.”

“What are they?” she whispered back.

“Juggers.”

That was as far as I got before the magenta jugger swung its huge head in my direction. I saw those eyes zero in on me.
Damn,
I thought,
it must have heard me talking, right through my helmet.
I hadn’t realized their hearing was that acute.

I didn’t waste any more time. I fired a spray of bullets with my snap-rifle. Five or six of them pierced the monster, and it roared in pain but didn’t go down.

That was it for me. I turned and ran for my comrades. Behind me, although I couldn’t see them due to my helmet, I heard the sounds of thunderous pursuit. I hadn’t expected I would be able to outrun these overgrown lizards, and I was right. They were clearly gaining.

“Bringing home three juggers!” I shouted.

I heard the bio specialist curse in response. She ordered our ragtag team to disperse, but I wasn’t listening to the details.

There’s something special about being chased down by big predators that I can’t easily explain. The experience struck a primal chord in my body. Something from my distant ancestors, I suspected. The pack was on my trail, and my feet knew it. I’d never run so fast in all my life.

Dodging between tree trunks and plunging undergrowth, I tried to put obstacles in their path, but it was pretty hopeless. They were native to this land, and they were twice my height. They easily went around trees, hopped over fallen logs and continued to gain on me.

“Hit the dirt, McGill,” said a rough voice.

I barely had time to comply. The weaponeer had set up his plasma cannon in the path of the onrushing saurians. A heavy thudding sound rang out, making every frond in the vicinity shake with the vibration.

I flipped over on my back and aimed my rifle toward the enemy. The nearest one was a mass of walking meat. The left side of its body was gone, replaced by a foot-wide smoking hole. The plasma cannon had burned right through it.

As a testament to the fantastic vitality of these creatures, the blue-scaled monster managed to stagger two steps closer, looming over me, before it toppled.

The next one appeared, and everyone there lit it up with fire. I didn’t even have time to climb to my feet. I lay there on my back in a pile of rotting vegetation and saurian blood, shooting up at the second blue dino.

In the end, I think it was the pain of our shower of fire that stopped it, rather than the damage we did. Its scales were lashed by bullets, and its flesh appeared to explode with bloody holes. It looked as if its skin was popping with a hundred small eruptions.

It had been intent on biting me, but, when faced with such a withering amount of firepower, it reared up screeching.

It turned to run but fell over and began thrashing instead. I got up and fired with the rest of the team.

That was our collective mistake. I think, looking back on the moment, the older more experienced members of the group should have known better. After all, I’d reported that there were
three
hostiles, not two.

The magenta lizard finally made its appearance. It did not charge in after the two blues, however. This one was smarter. It had spent the last few seconds circling around and now charged us from behind.

Specialist Grant went down first. The creature snapped her head right off, helmet and all. There wasn’t time for a scream—she was just gone.

The beast turned its malevolent gaze toward me. As we scattered and fired at the monster in our midst, she picked me out. I think she was still mad about my ambush.

She charged, and she almost got me. I was close enough to see that huge head, full of countless curved fangs. Many were broken, and some had shreds of hanging meat and tendons caught in them. But there were plenty left intact for me, enough to kill a man in a single chomping bite.

Then the monster’s head exploded. Sargon had managed to recharge his plasma cannon and bring it to bear again. I was quite happy with him at that moment.

I climbed to my feet again, and gave myself a shake.

“You outlived a specialist, McGill,” he said. “That’s pretty good.”

“I’m very glad you can aim that thing in close quarters,” I said, gesturing toward the huge tube he had rested on his shoulder. I knew that the weapon was really intended as light artillery, designed to rain down fire at range upon a distant enemy. But he’d used it like an extremely powerful rifle.

He laughed. “I know my equipment. That’s how I became a weaponeer. You don’t get that if you can’t aim.”

Sargon looked around and frowned.

“Ah shit,” he said. “I’m in command now. Let’s report this. With luck, Grant will be waiting for us at the base camp. But look out, she’ll be pissed off.”

“Pissed at who?” I asked. “We killed the lizards that got her.”

“Oh, no,” he said. “We won’t get away with that. It will be our fault, somehow. Probably yours, to be specific.”

“Why would she make a big deal out of it?”

“This was probably the first time she’s been in command in a combat situation. By dying in the field, she’s probably blown her chances of advancing to veteran anytime soon. Veterans aren’t supposed to get their heads bitten off from behind while the rest of the team survives. It looks bad.”

I understood. It was the type of logic the Legion Varus used all the time when considering people for advancement. They didn’t believe in luck, and they didn’t reward failure.

-7-

When we made it to base camp at the foot of the black cliffs, Anne Grant,. I found that to be amazing. The technology was so far beyond anything we could do on Earth. The system that grew a new body for the dead was a benefit of Galactic trade. Some planet somewhere made the machines and sold them for credits. Since copying fallen soldiers was extremely useful to a military unit that sees a lot of death, our legions all had at least one.

Varus, I’d learned, had several. One additional unit stayed aboard
Corvus
at all times. The other was deployable and had been brought here by means I didn’t understand yet. The light troop regulars weren’t interested in talking to me about it, either. I suspected legion officials had shipped the unit to our target world under guard, to be set up by whoever had signed the contract. Once in-system,
Corvus
dropped the troops and downloaded our data. The revival units always had work to do after we’d dropped.

I didn’t get to see the machine itself. It remained under heavy guard inside a puff-crete bunker they’d just fabricated and sunk into the ground. I was curious, but no one cared to satisfy the curiosity of a recruit.

The freshly revived bio specialist, on the other hand,
was
interested in us. As soon as Grant came staggering out of that bunker, she wanted us all hung.

When we reached the camp, tired and haggard, she didn’t let us reunite with our units and have a shower and something to eat. She pounced immediately. In her wake was Centurion Graves.

While we were still out of earshot, Sargon leaned close and said: “She’s not going to let this go easily. She has to blame it on someone—other than herself.”

I saw what he meant. The bio was furious. Graves, however, wore his usual stern, impassive expression.

“You two?” the centurion asked, looking at Weaponeer Sargon and myself. “I might have known.”

“Is there some kind of problem, Centurion?” Sargon asked innocently.

I decided to keep my mouth shut. In this situation, the weaponeer knew what he was doing better than I did.

“Yes, there is,” Grant said. She glared at each of us, but seemed to hold an extra dose of venom for me. “That’s the recruit. I sent him out on point, and he led us right into an ambush. He’s your man, Centurion. I expect him to be disciplined.”

“I discipline all my recruits when it’s required,” he said. He turned to Sargon and demanded a report.

Sargon stood at attention and gave his recollection of the events that transpired. Grant glared throughout this time, and I suspected her report wasn’t matching up with what Sargon was saying. His tale emphasized the use of his big weapon to personally bring down two of the three theropods.

At last, Centurion Graves turned to me. His eyes were dead gray and his face seemed to hold no expression at all.

“Which of these two accounts more closely resembles the truth in your eyes, Recruit?”

I hesitated. I could support Sargon, or I could say I didn’t see the details, as I was too busy dodging fifteen-foot tall lizards. I certainly wasn’t going to support the bio specialist’s story as it had me in the starring role of the village idiot.

I decided to make a dangerous play.

“Everyone sees a combat action through different eyes,” I said. “What I saw was three saurians chasing me. One of them was smarter than the others and circled around. She caught the group by surprise while we were dealing with the first two. If you ask me, we were outmaneuvered, that’s all.”

Nobody looked happy with this statement. Graves didn’t react at all. He just stared at me, then nodded. “All right,” he said. “You were cut off, you were a straggler group and you encountered the enemy. The team won the fight and returned with only one casualty. I say that sounds about average given the situation. Dismissed.”

He turned around and walked away. Grant glared at both of us, but she turned on Sargon, not me.

“You could have covered for me. Why the grandstanding about how big your cannon is?”

Sargon shook his head. “What are you complaining about? No one is in any kind of trouble. Your record will be clean. Next time, just stick to the facts, good or bad, if you’re dealing with Graves. He’s very businesslike.”