Orphan's Triumph

THIRTEEN

TWENTY MINUTES LATER, wind whipped our helmet antennae and swirled a snow fog so strong that, even with enhanced optics, visibility was down to forty feet.

Howard shouted, his voice booming in my earpiece, “It was the atmospheric disturbance created by the Scorpions’ hypersonic passage. Now the storm’s building on itself.”

I winced. “Howard, we have radios. You don’t have to scream.”

Howard slapped at a rope that writhed in the growing gale as it dangled again from the Scorpions. “Jason, we can’t abort this now.”

Howard’s Spooks, working through the gathering blizzard, had cut through the Ganglion’s armored housing, and we had our first look at Slug royalty after three decades of war.

It was a blob as big as a two-seat urban electric and as green as snot. No evil eyes, flailing tendrils, or slobbery fangs. Just a blob with a half-dozen thigh-thick armored cables plugged in around its midsection. The cables, torched black by the Spooks’ cutting charges, now led nowhere.

The exposed Ganglion, free of its armored housing, hovered above the snow on a disk, presumably held up by Cavorite.

I leaned into the wind, toward Howard. “It’s mute and blind now?”

“I think so. But it could have-”

Zzeee.

Someone screamed.

I said, “Heavys!” The Slugs waged war more like Neanderthals than like a millennial master race. If something they didn’t like got in their way, they threw an object at it. Slug Warriors’ magnetic-rail rifles were just scaled-down versions of the Slug artillery piece, which tossed a projectile the size and weight of a wall safe.

Red fog spat at us, mixed among the snowflakes. The fog trailed back thirty feet from Howard and me, to the neck ring of a Spook kid’s armor. A single heavy round, lobbed in here for ranging purposes, had decapitated him.

I said to Howard, “It called fire on its own position! We gotta get out of here.”

A surrounded human soldier might call artillery fire down on his own position, to take the bad guys with him, and save his buddies or his mission. Slugs behaved the same, but the altruism was missing. In this case, it was simple logic for the Slugs. The Ganglion wanted its troops to kill it, lest we be allowed to capture it. Also, of course, it wanted to kill us.

The commander of the infantry was already moving his troops off the Ganglion hummock. Four Spooks had fastened ropes to the Ganglion’s motility plate, so they could tow it away from this spot before the Slug heavy rounds began raining down on us.

Zzee. Zzeee. Zzee.

A battery volley of red-hot heavy rounds thudded around us.

Crump.

Above our heads, a heavy struck a Scorpion amidships. The Scorpion disappeared with a rumbling boom. It didn’t explode. It didn’t crash. It disappeared.

Howard said, “The round stripped the shielding off the Cavorite mass. The ship shot away from here at miles per second.”

Crump. Another Scorpion disappeared.

Three of the Spooks who had been pulling the Ganglion out of harm’s way lay dead alongside it.

In my earpiece, the Scorpion Squadron leader said, “Raiding party reembark! We’ll get you out of here!” He would also get his own ships out of here, before more of them got creamed.

Another heavy volley rained in; a round struck a man, and he vanished.

The ground commander radioed Howard. “Colonel Hibble, we can’t get a sling on your brain plate in time.”

Howard said, “Get your troops out. The Ganglion weighs nothing. Two people can tow it out of the kill zone. You come back and pick us up after the storm.”

I sighed. I knew who those two people were going to be.

Howard was a devious geek, but under fire he developed a heroic streak.

Zzee.

I flinched, though I had no idea where the incoming was bound, and something knocked me faceplate-down in the snow. I lay there and felt around my shoulder. A Slug heavy had lawn-mowered down my back, stripping away my pack and my armor’s life-support systems. But except for a thump between my shoulder blades, I seemed to be unbroken.

I levered myself up to my knees and peered through the storm.

Troops snaked up ropes, back into the remaining Scorpions, as Slug rounds continued to pound our landing zone. Wounded were roped up before the able-bodied GIs, as, it appeared, were bodies. That would probably cost lives, but no Ready Brigade soldier was going to leave a buddy behind, even under an artillery barrage.

Howard and I grasped the tow ropes on the Ganglion and leaned forward as we towed it through howling snow and away from the zero point where the heavy rounds kept rattling down like hailstones.

The remaining Scorpions, barely visible through the driven snow, buttoned up, then disappeared.

The heavy rounds stopped. Silence, except for the wind, returned to Weichsel.

By my visor display, Howard, our green POW, and I had already moved four hundred yards north of the landing zone. My display also said straight-line winds were gusting to one hundred six miles per hour.

I toggled through my visor display to Systems Check, then swore. My armor’s heater had quit. Actually, it hadn’t quit, it had left the premises, sheared off by the Slug heavy’s near miss. Already, despite my exertions, I shivered inside my armor.

According to our intel, two thousand yards from our landing zone, a perimeter defended by ten thousand Slug Warriors ringed the Ganglion hummock from which we fled with our kidnap victim.

If we could slip through that perimeter under cover of the storm, we might find a place to hole up. If we remained inside the perimeter, when the storm blew out we would be dead meat, and our prisoner would be rescued or killed by its own troops.

We slogged on, completely blind now and crawling to stay beneath the worst gusts, until my visor display predicted that the northern segment of the Slug perimeter, populated with its share of ten thousand unfriendly, man-sized, armed, and armored maggots, lay two hundred yards to our front.

Inside my armor, I shivered harder.