Orion Among the Stars

Chapter 3

While most of the rest of my squad grabbed a precious few minutes of sleep, I went to the edge of the swamp and worked the controls on my belt in an attempt to raise our equipment packs from the bottom of the bog.

One by one, slowly, reluctantly, they came up with big sucking sounds, like someone pulling his boots out of clinging mud. The flight packs worked even under water. I only hoped that their packaging was watertight. Dripping mud and slime, they hovered in the dark night air in response to my command. In the view of my visor’s sensors they looked hot red against an eerie yellow-green background.

One of the swamp creatures snaked a tentacle to the nearest of the packs, touched it, decided it was not food and sank back into the ooze. They live in the water, I told myself. They won’t come out of the swamp and up onto dry land. I fervently hoped so.

Then I wondered, If the planetary survey did not detect that this clearing was a swamp, if the scouts did not know that there are dangerous carnivores down here, how accurate is Intelligence’s estimate of the enemy’s strength and capabilities? It was not a pleasant rumination.

Sergeant Manfred rotated the perimeter guard every twenty minutes, giving each trooper about forty minutes’ rest. He did not seem to sleep much. I had been built to need hardly any sleep at all. Had he been given the same strength? Could he control every part of his body consciously, even the involuntary nervous system, as I can? Could he slow down his perception of time when the adrenaline flowed, so that in battle his enemies seemed to move in slow motion? Could any of them?

I wondered about that until I saw him finally grab a catnap after the third set of guards relieved the second shift. No, Manfred needs sleep as much as the rest of them. He does not have my talents. None of them do. They are simply ordinary men and women, bred from cloned cells and trained to be nothing but soldiers.

After an hour the whole squad assembled and we glided through the forest toward the rendezvous point I had selected, the bulky equipment packs bobbing behind us. The trek was pure hell. It was hot and sweaty inside our suits, but when some of the troopers took off their armor, biting insects swarmed all over them. They put the armor back on, but the insects stayed inside their clothing, feasting on their flesh. It would have been funny, watching them trying to scratch themselves inside their armor, if they had not been so miserable.

The wounded were even worse off. As they floated in their flight packs, they moaned endlessly. One of the sergeants bawled them out in a vicious, half-whispered snarl:

“You whining bunch of mutts, you’d think your guts had been pulled out the way you’re screeching. What are you, troopers or sniveling crybabies?”

“But Sarge,” I heard one of the troopers plead, “it’s like it’s on fire.”

“I’ve got four decorations for wounds, Sarge,” another said, “but this is killing me.”

Every centimeter of the way, as we groped through the dark forest, with the insects buzzing in angry clouds about our heads, the wounded troopers cried and begged for something to stop their pain.

Then we ran into the squad led by Lieutenant Frede, the unit’s medical officer. Her wounded were whimpering and groaning just as badly as my squad’s.

“I can’t really examine them on the move, sir,” she said to me. “Can we stop for ten minutes? And may I use a light to see their wounds properly?”

The enemy was supposed to be halfway around the planet. But what if there were other nasty surprises in this forest, like the swamp things that had tried to eat us? I glided among the trees in silence for a few moments, weighing the possibilities. Frede hovered at my side.

“All right,” I said, my mind made up. “Ten minutes. Keep the light shielded.”

I went with her as she examined the first trooper, a woman whose forearm had been cut when one of the swamp monsters punctured her armor.

The wound was crawling with tiny red ants feasting on her torn flesh. Frede jerked back with surprise as the ants, obviously bothered by the light, began burrowing into the woman’s skin. The trooper screamed, whether in pain or fright I could not tell.

I took off the armor from my own injured leg and saw that the ants were chewing away. One of the drawbacks of inhibiting pain signals is that your body can no longer warn your brain of its danger.

Frede swallowed hard, then went to work on the wounded troopers. She had to flush out the ants with liquid astringents that burned so badly the troopers yelped and howled with pain. I stayed silent when my turn came and received admiring glances in the darkness of that tortured night.

It took more than ten minutes, but not much more. Frede was quietly efficient, once she got over her first shock of discovery. But as we powered up the flight packs again and started to glide forward through the trees, she said to me, grim-faced, “I hope those ants haven’t laid their eggs under the skin.”

A pleasant thought.

“I’ll have to examine all of you once we set up base camp,” she said.

We pressed on to the rendezvous point. The giant trees rose all around us in the pitch-black night like the pillars of a colossal darkened cathedral, but their lowest limbs were dozens of meters above the hummocky, leaf-littered forest floor. There was hardly any vegetation on the ground, only an occasional low-lying bush or shrub and thin grass. The high canopy of the lofty trees blocked sunlight very effectively, I realized, preventing much foliage from growing at ground level.

So we drifted through the massive boles of the trees like two squads of ghosts gliding through the sinister night. Muttering, complaining ghosts; clouds of biting insects still hounded us. At least the wounded stopped their whimpering once Frede got rid of the vampire ants. Now and then one of the equipment packs bumped gently into a tree or got wedged between two trunks and some of us had to go back and move it away, then find a wider avenue for it. After nearly two hours of this stop-and-go we finally reached the rendezvous point.

One of the other squads was already there, and the fourth showed up shortly after we did. Once Frede attended to the other wounded, I called a meeting of my lieutenants, leaving the noncoms to direct the checkout of the equipment packs and to make certain we had not lost any. The rest of the troopers began setting up our tents.

All three of the officers shared an uncanny resemblance. They were all about chin-high to me, and had broad, high-cheeked faces with clear blue eyes; they looked enough alike to be brother and sisters. In the dim light of our field lamps I saw that they even had nearly identical sprinkles of freckles across their noses. The army must have cloned them from the same genetic stock.

Lieutenant Frede, my medical officer as well as a squad leader, seemed levelheaded and not given to panic. Yet she looked plainly worried.

“Two of my troopers died,” she said as she took off her helmet. The same short-cropped sandy brown hair as the other two lieutenants. “I haven’t been able to do much more than give them a superficial look-see while we were on the march here, but it seems to me that the wounds those monsters inflicted on them were not serious enough to be fatal.”

“Then what killed them?” I asked.

Swarms of insects whined all around us. She slapped at them. We were all scratching and trying to wave the bugs away.

“I think those swamp monsters must have injected a toxin into the wounds,” Frede said, scratching inside the collar of her tunic.

“Poison?”

She nodded. “Poison. Which means that our other wounded may have been poisoned, too.”

“Is there any indication—”

She did not let me finish my question. “The wounded are more sick than hurt. I think they’ve been injected with toxin. They seem to be getting sicker by the minute. Maybe those damned ants are poisonous, too.”

I thought about that for a moment.

“I notice, sir,” she added, “that you were wounded in the leg. How do you feel?”

“Fine,” I said. Then I added, “My immune system produces antibodies very quickly.”

Another nod. “Then may I recommend that we take a sample of your blood and use it to transfuse the antibodies into the wounded men?”

“Yes, of course. Good thinking.”

So while the troopers began to assemble our transceiver and the dawn slowly lightened the leafy canopy high above us, I lay down on a cot in Lieutenant Frede’s medical tent and let her draw blood from my arm.

“Thank you, sir,” she said, holding up the syringe filled with bright red blood.

I sat up and rolled down my sleeve. “If you need more, let me know.”

“This should be sufficient, sir.”

I got to my feet. The tent’s bubble shape was barely tall enough for me to stand without stooping in its center. Four cots with sleeping wounded in them filled most of the floor space; the lieutenant’s examination table and other medical equipment were arranged along the outer edge.

Frede stood up also and gave me a critical examination with her sky blue eyes. “You’re not one of us, are you?”

“One of who?”

“The regular officer corps. You’re from a different gene stock. You’re bigger, darker hair and eyes, even your skin coloration is more olive than ours. Are you a volunteer officer?”

I made a rueful smile. “No, Frede, I’m not a volunteer.”

She broke into a sly grin. “Then somebody at headquarters must be worrying about our sex lives.”

“What?”

“According to the duty roster, you and I are paired for the duration of this mission. It’ll be my first time with someone outside of our own clone group.”

I must have stared at her like an idiot. Nothing in my briefings or my memories told me about sexual duties.

Her grin faded. “Just what I thought,” she said somberly. “You’re not a regular army officer at all, are you?”

I sat back down on the cot. “I’ve been selected to lead this mission by—” What could I say? A god? One of the Creators? An incredibly advanced descendant of the human race who regards us mere mortals as tools for his use, slaves for his whims? “—by the upper echelons,” I finished lamely.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “Most of us have already figured out that this mission is some fucked-up brainchild of the higher echelons. Why else would they have replaced our regular captain?”

“Was he your regular partner?”

Her eyes widened. “You are a stranger, aren’t you? Soldiers don’t have regular partners. The army decides who you pair with, just like the army decides everything else in life.”

I began to understand. These soldiers are created by the army, to serve in the army. They know no other life. No parents, no families. Nothing but the military way of life. Nothing but serving in the army.

“I wonder why,” I mused aloud, “the army didn’t do away with the sex drive altogether. Or even make its soldiers sexless.”

Frede made a noise that sounded like an angry snort. “Might as well ask why they don’t use robots instead of cloned humans.”

“Well, why not?”

“Because we’re cheaper, that’s why! And better, too. Because we have emotions. Ever see a robot charge in where it’s hopeless? Yeah, sometimes we get scared, sometimes we even run—but more often we stand and fight and kill our enemies even when we’re dying ourselves.”

I took a deep breath, considering all that. Then I said, “So the army allows sex as a form of reward, then.”

For an instant I thought she was going to slap me. Her eyes blazed with fury. “Where are you from? The army allows sex because without it we don’t fight as well. The sex drive is intimately entangled with human aggression and human protectiveness—both of them—at the deepest genetic levels. Don’t you understand that? Don’t you know anything?”

“Guess I don’t,” I admitted.

“By damn, I hope you know more about fighting than you do about the army.”

“I know about fighting,” I said softly.

“Do you?”

I nodded, then got to my feet again and left her standing in the middle of her tent, looking more troubled than angry. I knew about fighting, from the Ice Age battles against the Neanderthals to the sweeping conquests of the Mongol hordes. From the war against Set’s dinosaurs and intelligent reptilians to the sieges of Troy and Jericho.

I knew about fighting. But what did I know about leading a hundred soldiers in a war that spanned the galaxy, a nexus in space-time that would decide the existence of the continuum?

I began to find out.

Outside Frede’s medical tent, most of my troopers were busy assembling the transceiver that would be the hub of our base on planet Lunga. I could see from the number of modules they had already uncrated that we would have to knock down some of the trees to make room for the assembly. Two of the sergeants already had a team working on that, on the other side of what I now considered to be our base camp.

One squad was setting up the antimissile lasers, the only heavy weaponry that had been sent down with us.

“Nice of the big brass to send this down with us,” one of the troopers was saying as she connected cables from the power pack to the computer that directed the lasers.

“Yeah, sure,” groused the man working alongside her. “They don’t want their nice shiny transceiver bombed into a mushroom cloud.”

“Well, the lasers protect us, too, you know.”

“Yeah, sure. As long as we’re close to the transceiver we’ll be safe from nuclear missiles.”

“That’s something, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, sure. The brass loves us. They stay up nights worrying about our health and safety.”

The young woman laughed.

Other troopers were setting up bubble tents and stacking our supplies. All of them had shed their armor in the morning warmth and were working in their fatigues, which were rapidly becoming stained with sweat. The insects that had plagued us during the night had disappeared with the dappled sunlight filtering through the canopy of leaves high above us. The little camp sounded busy, plenty of grunts and grumbles and swearing. In the background I could hear birds trilling and chirping. Then the cracking, rushing roar of a giant tree coming down. A thunderous crash. The ground shuddered and everything went quiet. But only for a moment. The birds started in again, the soldiers returned to their chores.

I walked past the construction crews, out toward the perimeter where Sergeant Manfred was in charge of the security detail. He was in his mottled green armor, helmet on, speaking by radio to the soldiers on guard through the woods.

“Anything out there?” I asked him. I myself wore only my fatigues, although I had my comm helmet on and I kept a pistol strapped to my hip. I remembered a time when I wore a dagger on my thigh, out of sight beneath my clothes. I missed its comforting pressure.

“There’s something bigger than a tree lemur moving out at the edge of our sensor range,” Manfred said, his voice low and hard.

“Intelligence claims there’s nothing bigger than tree lemurs on the planet.”

“Those swamp things were bigger.”

“But here on dry land?”

“Could be enemy scouts,” he said flatly.

“Maybe we should dig in, prepare to fight off an attack.”

“Does Intelligence know how many of these Skorpis are on the planet?”

“They claim only a small unit, guarding a construction team.”

Manfred grunted.

I agreed with him. Intelligence had not inspired me with confidence, so far on this mission. “I’ll get a squad to start digging in as soon as some heavy equipment comes through the transceiver. In the meantime, you—”

The blast knocked me off my feet, sent me tumbling a dozen meters. Clods of dirt and debris pattered down on me; acrid smoke blurred my vision. I could hear other explosions, and the sharp crackling sound of laser weapons.

Manfred slithered on his belly toward me. “You okay, sir?”

“Yes!” There was blood on my hand, but that was nothing. “Get your men back toward the base.”

“Right!”

I lay there on my belly and squinted out into the woods as I yanked my pistol from its holster. Scarcely any shrubbery to hide behind in this parklike forest, but whole divisions of troops could be sheltered behind those massive trees. I wormed my way backward, looking for a depression in the ground that might offer a modicum of protection.

A laser beam singed past me, red as blood. I fired back before realizing that I should turn off the visible adjunct to the beam. The red light made it easy to see where your beam was hitting, but it also made it easy for the enemy to see where it was coming from. Tracers work both ways, I remembered from some ancient military manual.

Sure enough, a flurry of beams lanced out toward me. My senses went into overdrive as they always did in battle, slowing the world around me, but that was of little use against light-beam weapons. One of the laser bolts puffed dirt scant centimeters from my face; my eyes stung and I tasted dirt in my mouth. Another burned my shoulder. I hunkered down flatter, trying to disappear into the ground, spitting pebbles and blinking dust from my eyes.

A trio of grenades were arcing toward me. With my senses in overdrive I saw them wafting lazily through the air like little black grooved toy balloons. I popped each of them with my pistol while they were still far enough away for their explosions to harmlessly pepper the empty ground with shrapnel. Then a rocket grenade whooshed out of the woods; I had barely enough time to hit it.

I inched backward a bit more, still peering into the trees to find a trace of the enemy. Nothing. They were devilishly good at this. I heard a few muted explosions thudding far behind me, then silence. Minutes dragged by. Birds began to sing again, insects to chirrup.

I lay flat, staring into the trees, straining to catch some sight of the enemy, some trace of movement. Nothing. I carefully clicked off the visible tracer beam of my pistol, then fired into the general area where the grenades had come from. Still nothing. I held the beam steady on a bit of shrubbery until it burst into flame, but still no sign of movement, no sight of the enemy.

“Captain?” I heard in my earphones. My second-in-command, Lieutenant Quint.

“Go ahead, Quint,” I whispered into my helmet mike.

“Are you all right, sir?”

“Hit in the shoulder. A few scratches. Nothing serious.”

“They seem to have gone, sir.”

I ordered the security detail to report in, by the numbers. Four of my troopers had been killed, six more wounded. No further reports of enemy activity.

I waited for nearly an hour. Nothing. The rest of the hundred had dropped their construction chores, of course, and grabbed their weapons to come out and reinforce our perimeter. But the enemy had vanished as suddenly as they had struck.

Finally we trudged back into the still-unfinished camp. I doubled the perimeter guard while Lieutenant Frede looked after the wounded and a burial detail froze the dead. Frede seemed puzzled as she applied protein gel to my burned shoulder.

“Your wounds are halfway healed already.”

“It’s a capability that was built into me,” I said.

“But how? Biomedical science doesn’t know how to do that. If we did we’d make all our soldiers this way.”

I shrugged as she sprayed a bandage onto my lacerated hand. “I suppose I’m a new model. The first of a new breed.”

She gave me a suspicious stare.

“Well, the important thing is that we beat them off,” I said, trying to sound cheerful.

She still looked doubtful.

Outside her medical tent I saw Sergeant Manfred waiting for treatment. His face was nicked and one arm roughly bandaged with a blood-soaked rag.

“We beat them off,” I repeated to him.

“They’re still out there,” he said somberly, with the flat assurance of a veteran. “That was just a probe. They’ll be back. Tonight, most likely.”