Orion Among the Stars

Chapter 2

I got the command briefing as I assembled my troop and moved them into the landing vehicles. A flood of data and imagery flowed directly into my brain; the work of the Golden One, I knew. He was telling me telepathically what I needed to know to serve his purposes. And nothing more.

The planet’s name was Lunga. The area where we were to land was jungle, low, swampy ground, ideal for defenders’ ambushes and difficult for support from orbit. There were extensive oceans, rugged mountain ranges. No intrinsic intelligent life-forms: the highest order of living creatures was tree-dwelling nocturnal animals about the size of lemurs.

The enemy were humanoid in form, but much larger in build than any of us. Two and a half meters tall, they averaged, and very solidly built. They were not professional soldiers so much as a whole race of nomadic warriors. They called themselves the Skorpis, which in their language meant “Bred for Battle.” Where they came from: unknown. Why they had allied themselves to our enemies: also unknown. They were starting to build a base on Lunga. Why, I was not told. What strategic value the planet had was also not in my briefing. My job, as Aten had told me, was to set up the transceiver and hold it. Or die.

We boarded the landers in squads, twenty-five young men and women per squad, each of them in green camouflage armor and helmets, bristling with weapons. Not much talk as they filed into the landers’ narrow, cramped compartments. Most of the troopers looked grim, lips pressed together, doing what they were told by the numbers and trying not to let their fears show in their faces.

There were a few wisecracks, of course. Some of the kids covered up their jumpiness with wretched attempts at humor. And the usual gripes.

“How come we have to be the ones to go in? Why can’t they send some other team? Why’s it always have to be us?”

“ ’Cause we’re all heroes,” came a reply.

“Yeah. We’ll all get medals for heroism,” someone else said, sourly.

“What’s the matter, soldier, don’t you like the army?”

“Maybe he’s not happy in his profession.”

“Well, you know what they say: You’ve gotta be born to it. ”

At that they all laughed, even the one who complained. Their laughter seemed harshly bitter to me.

“Can it, you mutts,” growled their sergeant. “Find your places and strap in. This isn’t a joyride.”

Kids. From my physical condition I was not much older than they, but I knew I had led many lives, died and been revived time and again. The Skorpis were bred for battle, were they? I had been created for battle. Aten built me to be a warrior, a hunter, a killer.

And so had these youngsters, Aten’s briefing told me. Cloned from long-dead ancestors, gestated in artificial wombs, they were trained from birth to be soldiers and nothing else. They were raised in military camps, never seeing anything except military life, never allowed to mix with the civilian society that they were created to defend. They knew nothing but war, except for the brief periods between battles when they were trained for their next mission.

Some of their senior officers had been born naturally, to normal families, and joined the military voluntarily. But very few, even among the top officers, had homes and families outside the military. Like me, these troopers had been created to fight, to kill, and then to fight again until they themselves were killed.

I remembered the Sacred Band of ancient Thebes, the warrior troop made of pairs of lovers, men who would die fighting rather than let their partners down. And they had died fighting, down to the last one, when Philip’s Macedonians met them in the battle of Chaeronea. I had been there with Philip and his son Alexander. I had taken part in the hand-to-hand butchery.

What about these youngsters? Would they also fight to the last man—or woman? I recalled the words of an ancient general to his men: “Your job is not to die for your country. Your job is to get the other poor sonofabitch to die for his country.”

My job was to see to it that these young men and women won their battles with as few casualties as possible. I did not know them, not individually. Yet I was determined to be as good a commander for them as I could be. How good would that be? Would I be good enough, or would I get them all killed?

The testing time was fast approaching. Our landing vessel shot out of the cruiser’s launching bay, acceleration flattening us back in our liquid-filled seats. There were no windows, no viewing screens in the landing vehicle’s starkly utilitarian interior. Just the lurching and swaying of hypersonic flight and then the slamming shock of hitting the atmosphere, blazing through it like a falling meteor.

The whole squad was silent now. White-knuckle time. The enemy had thrown up nuclear missiles at the invasion fleet. We were supposed to be coming down on the far side of the planet, away from their only base. But what if they had more than the one base our scouts had detected? We had cleaned their satellites out of their orbits around the planet, but what if they had aircraft to intercept us? A single hit with a laser beam or the smallest of missiles would blow our hypersonic lander out of the sky. And us with it.

“Approaching jump zone,” came the word from the cockpit, little more than a whisper in my helmet earphones.

The ship was still bucking and vibrating badly, biting deeper and deeper into the atmosphere, its outer hull glowing cherry red from the heat. I stood up, unsteady in the rocking, jouncing plane.

“On your feet!” the sergeant bellowed. I knew his name: Manfred, a veteran, hard-bitten and tough enough to forge his squad into a unit that would follow him anywhere without question—and take care of each other, whether under fire or in some brawling training camp.

My three lieutenants were in the three other landers. Our plan was to hit four drop zones in a relatively clear flatland, consolidate our four squads, and then start to assemble the matter transceiver while establishing a defensive perimeter around the site.

It was a night landing. That made no sense to me, since enemy sensors could detect us just as easily in darkness as in daylight. It made things more difficult for us, not the enemy. But the upper echelons had dictated a night landing for reasons that they did not deign to share with the landing force.

So we buckled on our flight packs, tightened our harnesses and helmet straps and lined up for the jump. I was at the hatch, the first to go.

“Jump zone in ten seconds,” said the voice in my earphones.

The hatch slid smoothly open. A howling wind slammed at me, almost forcing me back a step. Automatically I pulled down the visor of my helmet. It was too dark out there to see anything with the unaided eyes, but the sensors in the visor lit up the scene quite well.

What I saw was not encouraging. A canopy of massive trees was whipping by, almost a blur at the speed the lander was maintaining. To jump into that jungle would be suicide.

“Jump!” rang in my earphones.

I jumped.

The flight pack vibrated against the small of my back, and suddenly I was hovering almost motionless in midair, falling slowly, floating almost. With my visor’s sensors I could see the unbroken carpet of the jungle canopy coming languidly toward me, countless arms of countless trees. Where was the clearing we were supposed to land in?

I was drifting, the energy sphere generated by the flight pack resisting both gravity and inertia but not quite overcoming them, so that I sank slowly, like a leaf drifting to the ground. It was almost a pleasant sensation. But no matter how languid my fall, I was still falling, and if I crashed into those thickly intertwined trees my chances of reaching the ground uninjured were dim.

It must have taken only a few seconds, but it seemed like hours to me. And then I saw the edge of the clearing, where the trees abruptly stopped and the ground was a relatively smooth carpet of grass.

Turning onto my back, I looked up into the starry sky and counted twenty-five silhouettes tumbling through the air. And behind them, the bulkier shapes of the transceiver’s components and our supplies and equipment. Out of the corner of my eye I caught a glimpse of our lander, wings tucking back now for supersonic climb, banking steeply away from us and lighting off its main engines, heading back to the cruiser in orbit.

I rolled over again and prepared to land in the clearing, working the flight-pack controls on my belt to bring me to a gentle touchdown on the grass. My boots touched the grass, all right, and then kept right on going. I splashed and started sinking.

“It’s a swamp!” I yelled into my helmet mike. “Don’t touch down. Hover and look for solid ground.”

I tried to lift out of the quicksand-thick swamp but my left leg had caught on something. I could hear Sergeant Manfred and some of the troopers calling back and forth:

“Looks like some rocks up there.”

“Set down easy, see if it’s solid ground.”

“Boulders—yaargh!” A scream.

I was trying to pull free of the swamp, ratcheting up the power level of my flight pack slowly because my leg was caught and I did not want to wrench it or pop the tendons in my knee. At the same time I was searching across the open area, watching my troopers as they hovered, searching for a safe landing spot. One of them had screamed. Why?

“Look out! That thing’s moving!”

What in the seven levels of hell was going on? And what was my leg caught on? The equipment packs were coming down now, splashing into the swamp like rocks falling in slow motion; sinking out of sight.

“It’s alive!”

“Blast it! But don’t hit Jerron.”

I realized that my leg was not caught on anything. Something had grabbed the leg and was holding on to it. Tightly. Tight enough to bend the armor of my legging. I could feel it squeezing against my calf. Whatever it was, it was trying to pull me down into the grass-choked water.

I cranked the flight-pack power up higher and lifted up out of the swamp with something hanging on to my leg. I looked down and saw a nightmare tangle of tentacles and sharp snapping claws. It was climbing up my leg, trying to crack my armor and get at the meat inside.

Still rising slowly into the night sky, I pulled my pistol from its holster and took careful aim. Don’t shoot your own foot off, I warned myself. I thumbed the laser power to low and tried to convince my would-be devourer to let go. It snaked another tentacle toward my wrist, pincer snapping audibly despite the rush of wind whipping past my helmet.

“It’s you or me,” I said aloud, thumbing the pistol up to half power and slicing off the reaching tentacle. The creature made a growling sound and waved the severed end of its tentacle in the air, spewing dark blood.

Looking down again, I saw its face: a collection of clacking mandibles and glittering eyes, dozens of them. I fired at the eyes, raising the power of my pistol slowly, astounded that the beast—whatever it was—took the punishment for what seemed like an eternity to me. Just as I began to wonder if the laser beam was having any effect on it at all, it gave a howling shriek and dropped away from me.

Suddenly freed of its weight, I shot up even higher into the night sky. I gulped for breath and then started back down.

A full-scale battle was going on below me. I could see laser flashes and hear my troopers yelling and calling back and forth.

“The damned rocks are alive!”

“And hungry! ”

“And friggin’ hard to kill!”

The entire swamp was filled with carnivorous creatures thrashing, slashing, grabbing at our bodies as if we had been sent by heaven to feed them. My troopers splashed through the soupy water, shooting at the swamp creatures while trying not to hit one another.

And our equipment packs, the components of the transceiver and all our supplies, had sunk out of sight to the bottom of the swamp.

“Full power on the pistols,” I called to them on the command frequency. “Whoever’s got two hands free, unlimber a rifle and go after them.”

Panting, battered, frightened, we finally fought free and made our way into the trees. The ground was firmer there and free of things that wanted to eat us. At least, it seemed that way.

We sprawled on the solid ground, massive trees rising in the darkness all around us, and caught our breaths.

“What the hell were they?”

“Think they come up onto dry land?” asked a worried voice in the darkness.

“They must have been figments of our imaginations,” one of the women said, sourly. “The briefing tapes specifically told us that no threatening carnivores have been identified on Lunga.”

“The highest form of living creature on planet Lunga,” quoted another soldier from the tapes, “is a harmless furry tree-dwelling mammalian about the size of a tree lemur.”

“So much for the scientific survey of this planet.”

“So much for Intelligence.”

“And the friggin’ scouts.”

“There’s no intelligence in Intelligence.”

“When’s the last time you saw one of those bald guys away from his computer?”

Another of the women grumbled, “But they’re so damnably smart about it. You notice they said no carnivores have been identified on the planet.”

“Well, I identified a few. My goddamned armor’s punched right through. Look at it!”

His chest plate was cracked where one of the tentacled claws had scratched across it. I looked down at my leg, surprised to see blood on my armor. My own, I realized. I had automatically shut down my pain receptors and clamped the blood vessels tight while I was struggling with the creature that had fastened itself to my leg.

“Sergeant,” I called, “set up a perimeter and establish guards. I’m going to raise the cargo packs out of that swamp and float them over here. We’ll rest here for one hour.”

“Yessir,” said Manfred.

I dialed the comm frequency of my helmet radio and called for the other squads. One by one they reported in, each of them telling a tale of swamp monsters. Two of the troopers had been killed on one squad. Several others injured.

I called up the map of the area and studied it in the view on my visor.

“We will rendezvous at point A-Six,” I told the other squad leaders, picking a spot that seemed high and dry on the contour map. “In two hours. Any questions?”

“One of my men is too banged up to be of any help to us,” said a lieutenant. “Can we call for an evacuation lift?”

“Negative,” I said. “We bring our wounded with us. And our dead, too.”