Mech

Sixteen

“The war is going badly, Chamberlain,” Mai Lee told the orchids. It was a nicer arrangement than usual today, full of crimson blossoms with accents of lavender. “The planet is being overrun.”

Mai Lee seemed calm enough, but beneath her placid surface raged a torrent of anger. The orchids wisely chose to remain silent.

On the huge holo-stage that dominated the room were displayed multiple battle scenes. All around the Slipape Counties other estates were in flames. Images of slaughter dominated the broken ruins of Castle Zimmerman in particular.

“All so quickly, my most pressing concern has shifted from Droad to this new assault,” she lamented. “With amazing speed, these aliens are destroying hundreds of years of history. They’re so easily wiping out enemies that I’ve struggled with for centuries. I find it all somewhat annoying. I’ve come to loathe most of my fellow aristocrats, but still, they were mine to loathe, if you catch my meaning.”

“Certainly, Empress,” said the orchids hesitantly. “Ah-there is another urgent call from the Zimmerman High Command.”

Mai Lee waved her hand imperially. “Display it.”

A red-faced older man wavered into being just to the left of the hummingbirds. His hair was in disarray and he carried a gun in his hand. “Mai Lee, I’ve retreated to the forests just north of your lands. You must come to our aid. Most of the kindred are dead. The Castle of my ancestors has fallen, but we can retake it with your troops, I’m sure of it.”

“Ah, so the great Zimmermans finally swallow their pride,” she said with an obscenely girlish giggle. She placed her fingertips together in a butterfly pattern and leaned back to bask in the moment.

“We must join forces! No one will be spared! They come right up from the ground, drop from the skies, hundreds of monsters,” Zimmerman looked down, shaken, reliving a recent memory. “They’re so fast!”

“But my fortress is stronger than yours.”

Zimmerman shook his head emphatically. “It doesn’t matter. You haven’t really prepared for an attack from beneath. Even though the hill you’re on is mostly rock, it won’t matter. They’ll come, they have good weapons now, and there are more of them every time. They’ll come and wipe you out as they did the rest of us.”

Mai Lee tilted back further, the picture of happy relaxation. It seemed that his every gloomy word gave her greater pleasure. Finally, she snapped upright. “I’ll take to the field, but not to save your precious plot of miniature forests and family treasures. I’ll take to the field if you’ll join me, if you’ll place your remaining vehicles and knights under my banner.”

Zimmerman glowered and blustered for a moment, his bushy white brows stormy with indecision. “Why would you leave your stronghold?”

“A painful decision, let me assure you,” said Mai Lee. “But a necessary one. I’ve studied these creatures and their tactics. Just as you pointed out, our fortresses were never built to defend against the kind of attacks they launch. They are serving only as traps for our forces, convenient concentration points for the aliens to destroy us.”

“All the same, what will you do in the field? Wait for them to come out and attack you? Before I commit my forces I must know how you plan to fight them.”

“My science staff has studied these aliens and concluded that they are a fast-growing, short-lived species. Genetically, all the different types are very similar, whether they fly, dig or march. It is my belief that they have a small number of queens, as would ants or termites. If we kill these queens, they will stop multiplying. We must carry our attack to the enemy, destroy whatever is generating all these appalling creatures. Just defending our lands is a losing proposition.”

“That’s all very well, but how do we find this queen?”

“Some days ago I captured one of these creatures and discovered that they use in-grown quartz crystals to communicate via radio waves. Triangulating carefully, we have located one of their nests, and I wish to assault it.”

“You’ll attack the nest, with our help? No hanging back at the last moment and using my knights as cannon fodder?”

Mai Lee snorted. “Your weaponeers are best used in ranged combat, where their plasma cannons would be put to good use. I myself will lead my troops down into the nest.”

“Ah, so you will be marching in your battlesuit, I presume?”

Mai Lee looked startled, but only for a moment before regaining her aplomb.

Zimmerman laughed unpleasantly. “You aren’t the only one with spies in the field.”

She waved away his words irritably. “Is it a deal?”

“I’ll not relinquish all command, but I will comply with your strategies. You will be in overall command.”

“Done,” she said, smiling. “Meet me on the Moonbreak Heights at dawn.”

After she had cut off the connection, she sat brooding for a time, watching alien monsters ravage her neighbors’ lands. One of the sections of the holo-stage showed a detachment of several hundred aliens moving swiftly into position to the south of her fortress. She would have to move soon.

Disturbed by Zimmerman’s words about spies in her midst, she headed down into the darkest levels beneath her fortress and there found the battlesuit, parked in its cubical. Climbing inside, she curled up into the womb-like pilot’s webbing to sleep until it was time to march, two hours before dawn.

No assassin would find her easy prey tonight.

“Gi!” cried out the peasants in terror as the lumbering battlesuit marched swiftly onto a lifter in the great courtyard. Running for the shelter of the village, the peasants scattered. No one had bothered to tell them that a war was in progress. The predawn light was a pleasant pink tinge in the air. Sounds of heavy equipment filled the last minutes of the night.

Surrounded by six squadrons of her heavy troops in full battlegear, Mai Lee’s lifter rose up to join the others. In unison, the flotilla moved off, surrounded by a flock of escorting helicopter gunships.

Reaching Moonbreak Heights and meeting the Zimmermans, Mai Lee drove her battlesuit down the ramp and onto the granite mountaintop. She was thrilling inside, this entire experience was turning into a fantasy for her. Over the years of her incredibly long, dull existence she had come to enjoy nothing more than battle, but was too wise to put herself into most of them. Life had become extremely boring of late. Now, however, simply sitting back would no longer do. It was no longer the wisest, safest course. The aliens had forced her hand. She almost felt thankful to them for this rare opportunity to indulge herself. She looked forward to witnessing and participating in a great deal of carnage. Like a child in a sweetshop, she relished every moment of the experience.

“ZIMMERMAN!” boomed the amplified voice of the battlesuit. Mai Lee grinned as she watched the man take an involuntary step back from the blast of sound.

“Turn that damned thing down!” Zimmerman growled back, not easily intimidated even by a madwoman driving several tons of high-tech weaponry.

Mai Lee modulated the volume somewhat, but still left it turned up to a domineering level. “Report your strength, commander,” she demanded.

Zimmerman stood in battlegear with his aides and bodyguards surrounding him in a nervous knot. “Now wait,” he said, upraising his forefinger. “We have to get some things arranged. First-”

“There will be no further arrangements,” barked the giant figure of Mai Lee. The suit took a half-step forward, powerful claws gouging the mountainside. “Place yourself under my command, at least strategically, and report your strength immediately. There is no time for dickering. We must move at once.”

“I plan to comply, but-” began Zimmerman again, his lips lifting from his teeth. His knights were snarling among themselves. One man threw his computer slate aside and drew his sidearm.

“Comply immediately or I will withdraw,” came the booming response.

“Sir, we have no need of this witch,” the young man who had drawn his weapon hissed in his ear. With her amplified hearing, Mai Lee caught every word. She recognized the youth as Zeel, one of the new hotheaded generation of the Zimmerman clan.

For a moment neither of the leaders spoke. Around them gathered the simian-like giants of Mai Lee’s palace guard and the expertly trained blue-suited knights of the Zimmerman clan. Both sides eyed the other with distaste and an eagerness to fight.

“We will comply,” said Zimmerman. A wave of emotion swept the Zimmermans. “But, we will keep a separate unit command, and my men will not follow your orders without my approval.”

Hidden from view, Mai Lee grinned inside her battlesuit. The grin soon turned into a cackle of mirth. She calmed herself enough to activate the exterior voice circuit and accept his offer.

Things moved more smoothly after the issue of command control was settled. The group set up the battle computers under a dome on one of Mai Lee’s lifters and gathered there to organize their forces. Although the Zimmermans had taken casualties, several other related clans had also bolstered their numbers. All in all, their combined armies represented a formidable, fast-moving force.

“We have mobility on them, and air-power. Additionally, they have lost the element of surprise,” boomed Mai Lee. Still wearing her battlesuit, she ignored the jibes of the officers concerning her personal cowardice. Let them see in battle who would be counted as a coward. She swept a powerful mechanical claw to the south, toward the Polar Range. “There, in the mountains around Grunstein, resides the nest of our enemies. After some careful maneuvering and a diversionary attack, we will strike it hard.”

“Where will we strike?” demanded a cadet out of turn.

Mai Lee wheeled on him. She let him ponder the blue radiance in the mouth of Gi long enough to turn pale before answering. “Right here. The enemy is coming to us, even now. And we shall be waiting for them.”

She brought her titanium fists together with a resounding clang.

Before noon they mounted their first counterattack. Tunneling had been discovered beneath the Arden, a huge tract of forestland that separated the Slipape Counties from the polar range. The aliens were, in fact, building an underground highway between their strongholds in the Polar Range and the counties.

But the Moonbreak Heights, a natural formation of solid granite thrust up from the planet’s interior, formed a barrier to the tunneling. Too deep to dig beneath, they would have to either dig around the obstacle, or take the position and cross it in the open before tunneling on the other side. Mai Lee thought they would try the latter, more daring approach.

Shortly before noon the aliens proved her right by boiling up out of the ground at the foot of the heights. Culus and shrade teams discovered their positions, and were quickly eliminated by sniper fire. Simultaneously, Mai Lee ordered a heavy barrage of artillery fire to suppress the enemy pouring out of the tunnels. The tunnel mouths were quickly turned into a mass of molten craters, and then smoke hid the scene from view.

There was a lull in the fighting.

“Looks like we gave them something to think about,” said Zimmerman, staring into a holo-image enhancing set of lenses. “I can’t make out anything moving, just a lot of bodies.”

“We surprised them, but we haven’t stopped them,” rumbled Mai Lee. “Do you see any of the whale-like digging creatures?”

“Yes,” said Zimmerman. He paused to adjust his goggles. “At least two of them, or what’s left of them.”

“Good.”

“What we should do now is head for their nest immediately. We can hit them by surprise before they get any stronger,” said Zimmerman. “Let them dig their tunnels. Before they’re done we could take their nest. Our lifters move much faster than anything they’ve got.”

Mai Lee grimaced. The man had been whining about this for over an hour now. “That’s why I’m in command,” she stated bluntly.

Biting his tongue, Zimmerman returned his attention to the foot of the heights. “You were right. They’re down there, forming up ranks just inside the treeline to rush the slopes. They must have opened up more tunnels further back in the trees.”

Almost immediately, exhibiting the blinding speed of attack that was characteristic of their tactics, a dark line of killbeasts rushed out from the treeline and began to climb the slopes. Without orders, the men along the ridge opened fire. Before they could reach cover, the alien line thinned and finally became ragged.

“We’re slaughtering them!” whooped the officers.

Then a wave of counter fire came up from the trees and the slopes. Rifles, plasma-weapons and laser carbines swept the crest of the ridge. Men screamed and were shorn in half. One of Mai Lee’s troopers, his helmet blown off and his head on fire, toppled from the ridgeline and rolled down the slope into the face of the enemy.

Covered by this hail of weapons fire, a new cloud of flying creatures rose up from the trees and zoomed toward the ridgeline. Mai Lee stabbed the intercom button, ordering her helicopters out of hiding. The gunships rose up from the heights and met the airborne enemy with heavy fire. Several culus squadrons diverted to attack the helicopters while others drove on to close with the men on the ridgeline. A great number of them were blasted from the sky to fall on the advancing line of killbeasts below in a rain of pulpy fragments.

Reaching the helicopters and attacking them directly, the crews found themselves in desperate hand-to-hand battles on board their own aircraft. Spiraling crazily, several of the gunships went down in roiling flames.

A handful of the flying demons reached the ridgeline and loosed their shrades. Men fought with knives and handguns. Screams echoed out over the Heights.

“Damn suicidal bastards,” cursed Mai Lee. She dented a battle-computer with a heavy blow from her fist. Fortunately, the machine was built to take such punishment and only flickered once before returning to accurate service.

“Look, they’re moving to flank us,” said Zimmerman, directing her attention to another screen. During the confusion of the culus and shrade attack, the killbeasts had taken the opportunity to rush further up the slopes. More and more dark knots of troops raced out of the treeline and took cover on the slopes. Fanning out, they maneuvered to gain the ridgeline on either flank of the humans.

“Focus your fire on the ones nearing the ridgeline,” ordered Mai Lee. Even she was a bit appalled with the strength and speed of the enemy, and with the eagerness with which they faced death. She was soon forced to spread her lines out more thinly on the ridge.

“Why don’t we just pull out?” demanded Zimmerman.

“You don’t understand. We have to repel their initial assault.”

Their conversation was halted when a spray of earth fountained up from the ridge alarmingly close to them in the command center. Like a surfacing whale, an umulk burst up right on top of the ridge and in the midst of their forces.

“It’s one of their digging monsters!” shouted Zimmerman, drawing his sidearm. “They’ll be coming up any second for a close assault.”

“But how could they get to the top of this rock?” demanded Mai Lee. “My geological surveys show it to be solid granite.”

“Probably there’s a fault like a well-shaft in the mountains. They move through earth like fish do in the sea. I’ve fought them before, remember.”

Mai Lee unlimbered the suit’s chest cannons, making ready to join the fight, but her troops reacted with surprising speed, managing to kill the umulk with an overwhelming storm of gunfire before it could pull back into the tunnel. It sagged down and blocked the passage to the surface, but it left open the question of other such faults in the rock, allowing the monsters to burrow their way up and burst out behind the troops on the ridge.

The attack up the slopes was stepped up to a further level of ferocity. Bounding with great energy in a general wave assault, the killbeasts came on like sprinters, ignoring the uphill climb. More culus squadrons were among them, zooming from bush, to tree, to rock on the way up, instead of simply flying straight at the men.

“We’ve done our bit to surprise them and bloody their noses, why should we lose men over this lump of rock?” complained Zimmerman. “Let’s pull out.”

“SHUT UP!” roared Mai Lee, dialing for maximum volume. She wheeled her battlesuit to face him. Chest cannons swiveled and locked-on, targeting his head. “I WILL NOT TOLERATE YOUR CRETINOUS COMPLAINTS.”

Zimmerman staggered back, clamping his hands to his ears.

As the echoes of Mai Lee’s shout died away, the dead umulk’s body, not more than a hundred meters from the command center, twitched in an unnatural fashion. With a sudden jerk it was pulled downward and it vanished from sight. A gaping black hole was left in its wake. Mai Lee tossed over a table, scattering a group of aides, and simply walked through the fabric wall of the command center and out onto the ridge. With swift liquid strides she drove the battlesuit toward the hole. She signaled for a detachment of her heavy troops to join her. She looked forward to a release of tension.

There was a moment of relative quiet while they encircled the hole and waited. She could hear her men breathing, panting really in unaccustomed fear. The aliens were unnerving, unlike anything they had ever faced. She reflected that they had become somewhat soft after years of sitting around the fortress doing little more than playing escort and abusing insubordinate peasants.

Thinking to see a flicker of movement far down the hole, one man opened up with his automatic. Everyone joined in, hailing gunfire down the black hole. Mai Lee had to shout at maximum volume again to get them back under control. Grabbing the man who had fired early, she tossed him into the pit where he disappeared, screaming.

Then she grew a bit unsteady on her feet. The battlesuit lurched alarmingly, the balance systems screaming. Hastily, she caused the suit to leap backward. The suit’s great clawed feet gouged deep wounds in the earth and stone. The ground where she had stood opened beneath several of the men and they fell in, waist-deep, struggling to climb out of the soil which seemed to have liquefied. Then they stiffened and blood gushed from their mouths. When they were dragged up, it was discovered they had been bitten in half.

Even as they dragged the corpses from the dirt a full culus squadron burst out of the hole, flying straight up. Arcing fire after them they were quickly shot down, but not before a rain of shrades had dropped amongst the men.

Mai Lee ignored it all, knowing it to be a ruse. These aliens fought well, her respect for their warcraft was rising by the minute. She let her men deal with the shrades and kept her focus on the mouth of the hole. She was rewarded when a large number of killbeasts sprang up to attack. With a mighty blast of blue flame she burnt them, firing her chest cannons in a sweeping spray. More and more killbeasts essayed the breach, but they all fell back, blackened and fragmented. Soon the attack halted. She ordered high explosives to be dropped into the breach and set off.

Striding back to the command center, she learned that the rest of the battle was going better as well. The killbeasts had been repelled from the heights with light losses on the human side except one or two spots where they had actually gotten into close range. The resulting desperate hand-to-hand battles had been fantastically bloody, the aliens selling their lives dearly.

“They are pulling back, withdrawing,” said Zimmerman. He was white-faced and exhausted. Mai Lee noted that his lips curled back from his teeth at the sight of her, but he still managed to sound calm. “Perhaps you were right to keep the position, but won’t they just gather a larger force and attack again?”

Mai Lee snorted. “Of course they will. We only stayed to attract an even bigger force here. Now that they have pulled back to wait for reinforcements from the nest, we will move out. While their main forces are stalking us on Moonbreak Heights, we will storm their nest. This entire exercise was nothing but a feint, Zimmerman.”

Garth and Fryx awoke together when the shuttle seat bucked beneath them. Instantly, with no clear reason why, they knew the ship was going down. Canting forward at an alarming angle, they rapidly lost altitude. Garth released his seatbelt, slid over to the window seat that had been vacated by a passenger that couldn’t abide his company, and buckled in again. He stared downward.

Below them, the flitter was just coming down into the cloud layer. In an instant, the window went opaque white, then cleared again. The snowy peaks of the Polar Range appeared below the shuttle. They were on the approach to Grunstein Interplanetary, but they were descending much too rapidly.

Garth sat back, thinking about what he knew of shuttle flights. They would have touched orbit on the long leg out from Bauru, but only for a few minutes before the boosters cut out and let them coast back down again on stubby wings. The drop should be steep, but not hellish.

The other passengers were becoming alarmed around him. Several shouted for the stewards, demanding to know what was happening. A child was crying somewhere.

Garth turned his attention to the window again. He examined the stubby delta wing just behind his row of seats when he saw something flash by. It was an odd dark shape, a flying thing that zoomed past the window like a hurtling rock. The shuttle shuddered from another impact, and suddenly the bulkheads separating the passenger compartment from the cockpit slammed shut with a hiss of escaping gas.

“They’ve got a breach in the nose!” shouted a tourist wearing a fur hat with blinking, holographic novelty buttons all over it.

Indeed, it seemed that they were still losing pressure. Garth felt his ears ache, then pop. Hearing became difficult.

“Someone’s throwing rocks at us,” said a voice from behind Garth’s seat. It sounded like a child.

Garth could feel Fryx in his skull now, like a lead weight embedded there, fused to the bone. There was a familiar tickling sensation.

It was a culus! What a cruel cosmos this is that I should die locked in the mind of a balking imbecile! moaned Fryx in his head.

“What’s happening?” asked Garth aloud. His fingers began uncontrollably drumming on the armrests of his seat. To his surprise, he realized he was humming quite loudly as well.

They’re bringing down this primitive thin-skinned vehicle, you fool!

Garth looked outside and saw that indeed, more of the dark hurtling shapes were hitting the wings and doubtlessly the nose of the craft. He wondered worriedly what would happen if one of them went into the air intakes for the engines.

That’s precisely their plan, Fryx interjected into his thoughts.

Even as the two considered the possibilities, there came a great sound of tearing metal from the rear of the cabin. The shuttle lurched sickeningly, then nosed toward the mountaintops at an even steeper angle.

Get away from the windows! Move to a center seat in the rear section of the cabin! commanded Fryx.

“What about the crew? Can’t they control it?”

They’re all dead, if not from the bodies of the enemy coming through their windshields then from the lack of oxygen. Now, get away from the windows before I am exposed!

Before Garth knew what he was doing, he was out of his seat and moving back up the aisle. He knew this to be the coercion of his rider, but for once he didn’t object. The shuttle was now canted at such an angle that it was as if he was climbing stairs. Ignoring the other passengers, who in their fear were also ignoring him, he found a seat in the rear of the cabin and buckled himself in.

Then the automatic braking kicked in and he was wrenched against the seatbelt. He had gotten it into place just in time.

The rest of the crash was a blur. Although it only took a few seconds, perhaps less than a minute, to Garth it seemed to go on forever.

Upon impact, he blacked out. He had the faintest impression of seeing water splashing against the windows before he lost consciousness.

He awoke a short time later to see that the shuttle had indeed struck a mountain lake, whether from sheer chance or the excellent programming of the auto-pilot, he couldn’t be sure. Designed not to sink immediately, the shuttle groaned and creaked like a sailboat in a storm. Icy water lapped at his ankles.

The emergency hatch in the roof of the cabin was the first one to be opened. Surprisingly, none of the passengers had yet managed to get to it when it swung up and outward, letting in welcome sunlight and a biting cold breeze of fresh air.

Garth’s seat was just below it so he was among the first of the humans to see the monster that peered in at them. Unlike the other passengers around him, Garth didn’t cry out in terror. He merely stared.

A killbeast! screeched Fryx in his mind. A wash of numbing horror swept over them both.