“Have you seen any lead-lined bunkers out here?”

  She shook her head and bit her lip. “Not so far, sir.”

  “Wonderful.”

  Kivi walked away, and I stared after her, but I didn’t really see her. I was thinking about my entire command—actually, all of Legion Varus. We were stuck on an unfamiliar world without support or shelter. The deaths were going to come fast and hard—and possibly be permanent. We didn’t know yet if any lifters had made it down with revival machines.

  Taking stock of our supplies, I soon noticed we didn’t have much food. The air however was breathable, and the water could be filtered and consumed. We even had a pretty good supply of ammo—but so far, there wasn’t anyone to shoot.

  My gaze drifted upward. I couldn’t see the ships up there with my bare eyes. The sun was too big and bright for that. But I knew they were up there.

  Checking my tapper, I watched until all the feeds from the sky fizzled out. That could only mean one thing: The fleet had retreated, and they’d left us down here to die alone.

  -24-

  We hunkered down in the crater until darkness fell. I was kind of waiting until Graves contacted me and established operational command of the cohort—but he never did. I was following orders to maintain long-range radio silence until relieved, but I didn’t like it.

  The word from nearby units indicated the lifter with our direct commanders aboard had been taken out on the way down. This was being whispered among the techs from other units in the vicinity. I didn’t dare tell my troops, because morale was low enough already.

  Instead, the line I gave them went something like this: “If we can hold out until dawn, we’ll be fine. Relief will come.”

  It was all a lie, of course—but a good lie. Half the troops seemed to believe it, or at least, they wanted to.

  When night fell, it was a thick velvety kind of darkness. There was no moon, and the sky was overcast. The only light was from fires in the distance, and the shimmering bluish glow of the streetlights from the massive Mogwa city.

  Although we were right up against their dome, we weren’t all that close to the city itself. There had to be at least ten kilometers of open land—farms and forests—before the buildings began. I guess that made sense, as they had to eat somehow. Back on Trantor, they’d paved over all the oceans with streets. They used the sunless seas underneath as a vast farm, growing algae and fish to consume.

  Here, they hadn’t progressed so far with their utter remapping of the natural environment. They were still tilling fields and harvesting food the old-fashioned way. Call me a hick, but I liked this world better than Trantor.

  “McGill!” Kivi said, crawling to my position. We were all lying in the crater, trying to keep our heads down.

  “What’s up, Specialist?”

  “I’ve got word from 7th Unit. They’re under attack.”

  “From what?”

  “I don’t know. It’s total confusion. Listen.” She flicked at her tapper and strange sounds came into my headset. I heard screams, grunts, whirring noises and the rapid fire of power bolts.

  Standing up, I lifted my head over the rim of the crater. Everyone else was keeping low.

  To the north stood the glassy dome. It was blue-green in the night. It looked like an upside down salad bowl of gigantic proportions.

  Off to the west… yes, I saw a firefight. Something was up—a vicious struggle a few hundred meters away.

  Unlike my unit, Manfred had taken his 7th down into a gully. A crack in the ground. I could see bolts spraying up into the sky and flashes going on down in that gully.

  “We’re moving out!” I announced to a hundred upturned faces. “Light platoon, head for 7th Unit’s position. Move quick and spread out. Look for trouble. Heavies, follow them when they’re fifty meters out from the crater.”

  “Centurion?” Harris asked. He’d appeared out of nowhere and now stood at my elbow. “Is that wise? Maybe we should send relief, but not by charging everything we have over the landscape into god-knows-what.”

  I looked at him sourly. He was a man who always saw the safer path as more inviting.

  “Sir,” he said, interpreting my expression correctly. “I know Manfred is your friend and all, but—”

  “Harris… you’re right this time. I’ll leave the specialists here. You take your heavies and follow Barton. I’ll hold down the crater.”

  Harris swallowed and nodded. He didn’t give me any more grief. He led his men in Barton’s wake, and they crossed the open dirt to the gully where Manfred’s unit was still engaged.

  I zoomed in using both aerial buzzers and my HUD’s optical powers. It was as if I was with them, watching over their shoulders as they raced toward the gully.

  When they reached the edge and looked down, it was a scene of chaos. Bug-like things were moving among Manfred’s troops, slaughtering them. The firefight had turned into butchery.

  “What are those things?” I demanded.

  As I was using Kivi’s buzzers, she answered my question. “They appear to be… yes, I think they’re drones, sir. Land-crawlers. About the size of a man, or a large dog… they have six limbs and walk like insects.”

  I studied them for a few seconds. My troops lined the wall of the gully, looking down. The mass of struggling human troops had merged up with the drones.

  “Heavy platoon!” I shouted. “Harris, give the survivors supporting fire.”

  “It will be hard, sir. There’s bound to be blue-on-blue.”

  “I know it—fire!”

  They opened up, pelting the crawling machines with power-bolts from above. Some of them were knocked out—but not many.

  The enemy drones turned their nozzle-like weapons upward, toward the rim of the gully. They fired plasma beams that resembled a gush of flame from a flamethrower, but this flame was more ghostly, and more carefully projected. Some of my heavies were struck, and they were all forced back.

  “Not working, sir!” Harris called out to me.

  I squinted at the scene, knowing there were still some of Manfred’s troops down there, struggling to survive. I came to a hard decision.

  “Light platoon,” I said. “I want every other squad to toss in grenades. Aim for concentrations. Everyone take cover.”

  Barton was on the ball, as usual. She had her troops toss in grenades, all at once, less than thirty seconds after I’d given the order.

  The results were dramatic. Dozens of blue-white flashes went off. They kept going and going, like sparks in a fusion generator. Brilliant points of light blinked again and again, blowing apart clumps of men and drones alike.

  This time, the effects were clearly visible. The enemy had been damaged—but so had the human troops. After crawling around for a moment, stunned, the enemy realized Manfred’s unit had been effectively destroyed.

  Although many of the drones were damaged as well, that didn’t deter them. They turned as one and began to scale the walls of the gully—they were moving up to attack my troops, now that 7th Unit had been annihilated.

  “Harris! Barton! Full retreat! Return to the crater!”

  They needed no further encouragement. They began bounding over the rough terrain in our direction.

  Sargon loomed close. “What are we going to do, sir? Those things will boil up out of there and destroy us just like they did Manfred.”

  “I know it. Have we got any mortars?”

  “No sir… no 88s, either. But… we’ve got some indirect-fire missiles. They’re built to land on top of armor like that and destroy it from above.”

  I nodded, and I got my techs online and grilled them. I found out they had a few special EMP grenades.

  “Unscrew the warheads from the rockets. Load in the EMPs and fire them into that gully.”

  Fortunately, most of our gear was Imperial. They’d long since designed frontier weapons to be as interchangeable as possible. This design goal came from the Galactics themselves. They tended to build weapons and gear that fit humanoids of various sizes and types. Since there were countless different kinds of aliens in the Empire, it only made sense to build stuff that a lot of different species could use.

  The effort to achieve widespread compatibility had both positive and negative effects. As a benefit, we humans could usually pick up any piece of foreign equipment and use it. But there was a price to pay for that extreme flexibility. All our weapons tended to not fit us precisely right. Uniforms often had patched up tail-holes in the back, or extra finger-holes in the gloves—but all the gear was rugged. It all worked, and it was designed to be simple to operate.

  Our modifications to the indirect-fire missiles were easy to make. In less than a minute, the first rockets streaked high, then did a ninety-degree twist and roared down into the gully. The EMP blasts did their work, and the drones in the gully were electrically disabled.

  Unfortunately, not all the enemy drones had been in the gully when we’d unloaded on them. A number of them were still coming, chasing after Barton and Harris.

  Barton and her lights made it to us first. They scrambled up the rim of the crater and threw themselves into it. Once on our side of that earthen barrier, they directed fire downward, spraying snap-rifle rounds at the approaching machines. This seemed to have little effect, but I didn’t tell them to ceasefire. Maybe it would distract the enemy, or somebody might get a lucky hit now and then.

  Harris and his men came next. These were the troops I was worried about. I watched as thirty-two heavy troopers were chased toward me by twenty alien machines. Speed-wise, the race was going badly. The aliens were catching up.

  After we’d fired our indirect missiles into the gully, the drones stopped coming out of it. This indicated our gambit had been successful. I considered doing it again, landing an EMP volley right in the midst of Harris and his men.

  The trouble with that idea was the armor the men wore. Heavy armor is heavy. It was far worse than the star-stuff I was wearing. It required servo motors and computers for most men to be able to move with speed. An EMP would blast all that circuitry, despite our shielding. It was designed to do exactly that.

  I couldn’t afford to disable the core of my heavy infantry. Barton’s troops were already outgunned, and who knew how many more of these drones were running around. No—I was going to have to find another way to win this.

  The drones buzzed and clattered, their six metal legs churning as they raced after Harris and his men. It occurred to me that the enemy machines were rather similar to Mogwa marines—but smaller. These things looked just like the mobile power-armor the marines wore, but they were empty, instead of being full of angry Galactics.

  None of that mattered. These things were running down my men, and if they took out Harris, they would wipe out the rest of my command just as surely as they’d annihilated Manfred’s.

  “Weaponeers!” I shouted, standing up and shouldering an extra belcher. “Stand up and move out. We’ll advance to contact. We can’t let Harris face destruction out there alone.”

  Sargon and the others stood with me. They were startled, but they were game. The enemy had caught two of Harris’ men already, and they were fighting to the death with force-blades flashing in the night. We didn’t have enough time to let Harris’ platoon reach the safety of the crater. Most of them weren’t going to make it.

  “Barton, snipe for any weakness you can find. Just don’t hit us in the ass.”

  “Roger that, Centurion.”

  The storm of chattering snap-rifle fire quieted, turning into a steady crack of sniper fire. Meanwhile, every man with a belcher rushed downslope to meet the enemy. Seven of us in all charged together.

  Harris stopped running when we reached his line. His men weren’t going to be able to outrun their pursuers anyway. It was always better to turn and fight a pursuing enemy face-to-face than to be run down like stray dogs.

  I was wearing my special armor, spun of Vulbite spit and stardust. That made me the man in the lightest kit, so I reached Harris and his ragged line of troops first.

  The combat was wild, with the drones behaving like tiny tanks. They were as tough and fearless as only machines could be. Up close, their turrets spun and their nozzles gushed plasma. A man—even an armored man—was cooked alive when he took a full blast from that strange weapon.

  My weaponeers with belchers on their shoulders helped even things up a lot. Dialing down the aperture to a single narrow beam that was no bigger around than a baseball, but which hit as hard as a truck, we lanced single machines down each time we managed to get a dead-on hit.

  Harris’ men were, in effect, pinning the enemy drones and giving my weaponeers the opportunity to aim and release deadly beams into their midst. Sometimes, the beam struck cleanly and destroyed a crawling mini-tank without a human being touched. Other times, we burned them both down together into a confusing slag of man and machine.

  Right at the end, the enemy seemed to comprehend who their real enemy was. Two of the tanks turned their swiveling nozzles onto Washburn, who’d moved close to me and had a habit of whooping whenever he destroyed one of the enemy.

  Two streams of liquid fire struck him at once, from two different angles. He went to his knees, trying to lift his belcher for one last defiant strike—but the power of the enemy weapons overwhelmed him, and he sagged down, burning alive. Even the heaviest armor we had, that worn by weaponeers, wasn’t enough to stop the enemy’s attack.

  In revenge, the rest of us cooked the two drones, and they were left smoldering and glowing red with heat.

  After that, it was soon over. The drones kept falling until none were left.

  We staggered, panting with exertion. Men called for the bio techs, who rushed down from the crater to patch them up while they lay on the smoking earth in the darkness. No one among the wounded was going to be slated for a recycle today, because we didn’t know if there was a single revival machine on the planet that could print out a new human.

  We’d won a battle, but I’d now lost close to half my men—half my heavies, that is. The men that counted the most.

  -25-

  In the aftermath of the battle, we didn’t lounge around. No one knew if the drones were coming again with a fresh wave of machines. We hustled up the crumbling slopes of our home crater, and we threw ourselves into it.

  While the heavies and weaponeers took a breather and nursed their wounds, I ordered Barton’s lights to retrieve the wounded, rob the dead, and collect every scrap of useful gear we could.

  “At least we won’t starve now,” Harris said. He’d taken a hit in the leg, and he was limping. Normally, I might entertain the thought of a recycle for him—but tonight, that was out of the question.

  He hobbled to my position and threw himself down with a grunt.

  “How’s that leg?” I asked him.

  He eyed me coldly for a moment. It was only natural to suspect your commander of grim things when you were wounded on the modern battlefield. But after giving it a moment’s thought, he shrugged.

  “I think it’s pretty much cooked. I took a shot from one of those plasma gushers—only a few seconds, but a few seconds in a blast furnace can do all sorts of damage.”

  “Yeah… your armor is metal, so it probably carries the heat better than my stuff.”

  He eyed my black flexible armor thoughtfully. He reached out and pinched the arm, which was thick and rubbery.

  “I wish we had more of this stuff,” he said.

  “You know who just got a suit? Direct from Central?”

  His eyes narrowed. “Who?”

  “Tribune Winslade, our finest.”

  “Shit…”

  We both knew that Winslade rarely took to the battlefield in person. Even now, he’d probably bugged out with the fleet.

  “Sir?” Harris asked. “If those metal monsters come up here in strength, well… we’re toast.”

  “Agreed. What’s your point, Harris?”

  He pointed to my tapper. “What about contacting Graves? Or whoever is in fucking charge of this cluster?”

  I heaved a sigh. “We’re supposed to maintain radio silence until command—”

  Harris forced himself up on one elbow. “Sir, I don’t want to rain on your parade, but we just got our asses kicked by unknown assailants. We might not last until dawn. Manfred didn’t.”

  I thought that over. I counted my men again. If you thought about it as Manfred’s unit and mine combined, we’d lost around seventy percent of two units. That was rough.

  “Kivi?” I called out. “Get over here.”

  She hustled to my position and flopped down opposite Harris, who’d rolled onto his back to nurse his burned leg. He was opening up the armor and poking at it, spraying on foamy new skin cells, disinfectants and salves.

  “Yes, centurion?” she asked.

  “What’s that pack of techs doing over there? They’ve been poking at something big they dragged up from the battleground.”

  “That’s a dead drone, sir. We’re trying to figure out how it ticks.”

  I thought that over. “You pulled an alien machine into our camp without telling me?”

  “Yessir.”

  “What if it wakes up, or explodes, or sends out a distress signal or something?”

  She shrugged. “Then we’re slightly more screwed than we are right now, sir.”

  I nodded, unable to counter her argument. “What have you learned so far?”

  “Not much,” she admitted. “It’s a drone, and it’s advanced in design, but not insanely so. The basic construction is similar to a Mogwa marine’s power-armor. The weaponry is unusual, however. Those plasma cannons are unknown to us. Designed for antipersonnel use, I figure.”

  “Damned good at it, too,” grumbled Harris. He was still grimacing and poking at his leg.

  “Wrap that thing up or cut it off, Harris,” I told him. “Can you walk or not?”