Every round, gray, metal doorway had slammed open all at once. We felt surrounded, hunted and hated simultaneously. I immediately wished I had a sniper rifle in my hand. We could have put some fire down on some of those doorways from here.

  But alas, it was not to be. It was probably a good thing as well, as they would have been able to shoot back, and there were many more of them than there were of us.

  Each of the great doors was ten meters across. They rolled open and then closed again about thirty seconds later.

  Varus troops knew nothing if not how to hustle. They raced into the exercise zone and immediately spread out. Once they were inside, however, they became paranoid.

  Watching them, I had to note with a touch of pride that every other centurion had ordered their troops to proceed with some level of caution. Nobody charged at us too terribly fast. No, they were looking around everywhere, expecting an ambush behind every rock and tree.

  In the past, when similar games had been played and 3rd Unit was involved, I’d frequently staged vicious surprise strikes on my attackers the moment they entered the field.

  Everyone was paranoid—scared of each other and scared of me. It was a delight to behold.

  I wondered if my decision to camouflage my men and hide them among the rocks was helping. Since the unit commanders could see the hill they were supposed to take the moment they entered the chamber, it might be freaking them out that they couldn’t see any movement. They couldn’t see any troops here. We weren’t taunting them, shaking fists and spears. No, this time we kept quiet.

  A worried commander might even think we weren’t on the hill at all, that we were hiding somewhere out in the jungle. Honestly, that wouldn’t have been a bad move. We could have found another hiding spot out in the jungle somewhere, waiting for an ambitious group to claim the hill, only to charge out at the end and finish off the survivors.

  I’d considered but rejected the idea. Graves had wisely set up his clock, and that simple fact had made me decide to ditch that tactic.

  Glancing upward, I saw the large blue digits ticking away. They now read 56 minutes, 12 seconds. I’d decided I couldn’t afford to try anything tricky. I had to hold on for the hour and hope for the best.

  The attackers came from every possible angle. It was unnerving to watch them move stealthily through the trees and grassy fields. Around me, my officers, non-coms, and especially the troops themselves, whispered, pointed, and lamented their fate.

  “Enough whimpering and whining,” I called out. “If you all don’t shut up, I’m going to drown Carlos here in the lagoon.”

  There was some laughter, but they quieted. I wasn’t a man given to idle threats, and they all knew it.

  We waited. Surprisingly, the first fight broke out not between the units that we had targeted with Cooper and Della, but between the two units that were the farthest from us on the opposite side of the lagoon. Perhaps they’d realized they were both going to have to circle around somehow to reach us. That put each in the other’s path. Their commanders decided to preemptively strike one another, and an all-out melee began. Within a few minutes, there were fifty dead, maybe more. My troops hooted and jeered from cover.

  “We didn’t go down first!” Carlos kept saying. “Not first! We probably won’t be the last to breathe today, but we’re going to outlive those losers!”

  Maybe he thought he was encouraging the others, so I didn’t tell him to shut up.

  “Lookie-there!” Harris shouted. He’d been carefully watching the zone where I’d sent Della and Cooper to confront other units. “See the 9th? They’ve got to be more than halfway to us, but they just halted.”

  I wished I’d had better optics so I could zoom in, or a drone from my techs, but nothing that complex had been issued to us for this exercise. Instead, we had to squint, stare, and point.

  But what Harris had noticed was true. The unit that had moved the closest to us, the most rapidly advancing group, had suddenly halted. Now they turned around and cautiously stepped back the way they’d come. I winced, hoping that Della or Cooper weren’t in their path, or if they were, that they could evade detection.

  Not long after that, another unit coming from the portals came into view, facing the 9th. They were moving slowly, cautiously, obviously not planning to be the first to get to the hill—but they’d found trouble anyway.

  The men around me hooted and cheered as two units turned on one another. The fight was savage, probably because it was out in the open. Whoever had tricked the 9th had done so masterfully. I hope they’d managed to crawl away and live.

  “I bet it was Cooper,” Harris said with glee. “I bet he’s right in the middle of that shit-storm, dodging feet and pissing his drawers.”

  He was pointing at an outcropping of fake boulders in the middle of the field where the two units clashed. “You see that stack of rocks? I bet he threw from right there. He’s hiding in those boulders. Look what one spear can do!”

  “Isn’t that Jenny Mills’ unit?” Leeson asked.

  “I think it is,” I said. “Yeah… and she’s got a vicious temper when she’s feeling vengeful.”

  “You oughta know, sir.”

  I glanced at Leeson, but I didn’t admonish him. Everyone was in a good mood.

  “That’s right,” Harris said. “She’s not one to let somebody come up and peck one of her boys in the ass. She turned right around, and she’s going for it.”

  The two units threw down, and there couldn’t have been more than thirty or forty survivors left before it was over. Both sides broke and ran off to hide in the jungle.

  “With any luck, they lost their officers,” Leeson was saying. “Without leadership, they’ll never come and take us out.”

  I nodded. I was feeling better and better. So far, four out of the nine units approaching us had been seriously damaged.

  But now, it was about to be our turn. Approaching our flanks from the left and the right, each alongside the shoreline of the lagoon to our rear, were the 6th and the 4th Units.

  “Uh-oh,” Harris said. “Those boys hate you, don’t they, Centurion?”

  “Yeah,” I nodded, unable to deny it. “Hate. Pure hate.”

  Last year at Jungle World, the two centurions in question had somehow been blamed for a disaster that I’d caused with a bit of illicit drone-flying and a lot of large, angry apes. Graves had dressed them down for it, but they’d maintained throughout the campaign that the disaster had not been their fault.

  They’d never been able to prove their innocence. Now, mysteriously, they’d both flanked me. They were coming around from opposite angles toward my stack of puffcrete rocks.

  “This is it, kids,” Sargon shouted. “Get ready!”

  As if responding to his words, the approaching units emerged from the trees and charged at our hill, abandoning the shelter of the jungle.

  The battle was on.

  -19-

  When one hundred men are being charged by two hundred guys from two different directions—well, that’s a bad situation, period.

  We only had one real advantage, and that was the rocks that we’d hidden ourselves within. The enemy didn’t know exactly where we were—or even if we really were in those rocks at all.

  Regardless of their thinking, they seemed to be dead-set on killing us, no matter where we were hiding. They were advancing in a very decisive and determined way. I could almost feel the hate coming from those two centurions, who were clearly in cahoots against me.

  To my mind, they were making a mistake. They were taking unnecessary risks to knock me out of the game early—but so be it.

  When they got down to the last hundred meters, they charged. They held their spears in the air, puffing and leaping from bush to bush. No cover higher than a man’s waist could be seen for quite a distance around our rock pile, so they’d decided to get to us as fast as they could.

  I thought about ordering my men to cast their spears. Surely, in an exchange of fire, we would have been able to kill more of them than they could have killed of us, just because our rocks would have gotten in the way of the return fire.

  But I didn’t give the order. The enemy might simply ignore our shower of spears and then rush in close. If my men were down to knives, we’d be at a disadvantage despite our covering boulders. With longer weapons and superior numbers, I felt pretty certain the enemy could root us out of our stronghold.

  I decided on a different tactic as I watched them approach.

  “Sargon!” I shouted. “I want all weaponeers to throw. Clane! Have your lights tease them!”

  Clane and his light troops shook the palm fronds and other cover that we’d set up on top of the rocks. They bounced up like frisky gophers to look around. Showing themselves momentarily, they poked up heads, hands and spears. But none of them threw anything.

  At the top of the hill was a circle of my weaponeers. These were the men with the strongest arms and the greatest training with throwing things.

  As one, the seven men stood and cast their spears. Six of the seven each pierced a man in the chest and took him down, but the seventh, Sargon’s cast, took down no less than two of the enemy. Sargon himself was a master. He’d nailed one through the guts, but the spear continued on with such force that it stuck in the leg of an unfortunate light trooper girl that was running in the shadow of the dead man.

  The enemy had thus taken casualties before they’d even reached us. That sort of thing always caused a shock. A few of their charging lights even tripped over those who had fallen.

  Most of them, however, kept on coming. Our quick, deadly strike had created the hoped-for effect. It had both pissed them off and freaked them out.

  When they were only about thirty meters out, the approaching centurions on both sides ordered their troops to pause and return fire. They cast a hail of spears at our tower of fake rocks.

  I’d been expecting this. My troops were lying low, hiding in crevices and twisty little tunnels that ran between the puff-crete stones.

  Spears came flying at us all over our makeshift mountain. They sparked when their tips struck the artificial stone and fell clattering into the cracks among us. One or two of my men were injured, but since we were taking shelter, the attack was pretty fruitless.

  After their sweeping cast from both sides, they continued their headlong charge. At that point, I ordered all my troops to stand and cast point-blank.

  The enemy had essentially wasted their spears. Their casts had only given us more ammunition.

  Sargon was still heaving spears from the crown of the hill. My heavy troopers stood in the middle-zone heaving down rocks and spears as well. Our numerous light troops were all around the lowest ring of rocks. Their job was to keep the enemy from climbing to the crown of our hill.

  As the enemy got close, there was nowhere for them to hide. A few crouched or even crawled, but this mostly caused them to be tripped over. Some ducked, some dodged, but I had to guess that at least a dozen were struck down on each side of the hill.

  “They’re eating shit down there!” Harris shouted, his face split apart in a broad grin. He liked nothing better than to take advantage of a weak enemy.

  “Stand and cast!” I ordered. “Don’t miss, boys!”

  My heavies and the weaponeers had soon thrown all their own weapons, so we were reduced to scrambling to gather the spears that had been thrown at us by the enemy. These were strewn all over between the rocks. Our shower of projectiles slowed, but it didn’t stop.

  The two approaching armies, what was left of them, now formed ragged lines. They hit our bottom rank of stones. They crawled in-between the rocks and were greeted by Clane’s light troopers. A vicious series of knife-fights broke out all around the base of the hill.

  “Throw rocks when you run out of spears!” I ordered Sargon. “Harris, advance with the heavies. Push back anybody who breaks our line.”

  Here and there, when my light troopers were faced by superior veterans on the other side, they fell back. I hissed to see my lines folding.

  You would think Clanes men could have done better. After all, their flanks and rear were protected. The enemy was taking fire from above, and we had the psychological advantage. But still, there were many cases where Clane’s men simply couldn’t hold. They weren’t, after all, the best.

  Harris and his heavy fighters operated as my tactical reserve. They pushed back wherever there was a penetration. As soon as the enemy crawled on top of the first tier of the rocks, he charged them and drove them back into the field.

  Sargon’s heavy weaponeers had run out of spears by now, of course. They’d gathered a lot of head-sized puff-crete stones in preparation for this moment. While not as heavy as actual granite, these rocks were plenty hard and heavy enough to crush a man’s skull.

  They threw them with great accuracy, and with the added force of gravity, they nailed any group of the enemy that dared gather. The effects were devastating.

  When any army approaches a fortified position, the individual soldiers will naturally focus on their own knife and the knife of the enemy who is jabbing at him just inches away. Rarely do they look up.

  Crawling over the rocks, they made easy targets. They were caught unaware, with careful casts from above by my most powerful troops. Those who did make it, who were able to gain a foothold here and there, killed pockets of Clane’s men. Sometimes they reclaimed a spear or two when they took over one of the enclaves that honeycombed the stack of rocks.

  But then Harris’s heavies would arrive. Survivors were rooted out and destroyed. Here and there, a man ran off in fear.

  In the end, the enemy broke on both sides and routed. Beaten and broken, they ran off back toward the distant line of trees. Some dove into the lagoon and swam away, bloody and fearful.

  My men cast spears after them, but I told them to hold back. Every spear was precious. Taking a quick glance upward at the hologram clock, I saw we hadn’t even reached the twenty-minute mark yet. We had a long way to go.

  The first round was over, and my troops were panting. They began the grim business of stabbing at wounded enemies who wouldn’t die easily. We wanted no surprises when the next attackers arrived.

  We gathered up more rocks, loads of spears, and stacked more knives than we could use. We stockpiled them inside of our fortress.

  Forming a bucket-brigade, I had a great deal of this weaponry handed up to the top of our pyramid of stones. From there, it could be cast down with greater force when the next attempt was made to take our hill from us.

  “All right,” I shouted. “Clane, how many did you lose? Sound off!”

  “Twelve dead, sir. Five more wounded. A few of those are still worth their salt. A few aren’t. Should I dispatch the wounded, sir?”

  “Negative,” I said. “Patch them up as best you can. Give a spear to the injured, and stick them in a hole with their back to the dirt. Tell them to jab at anyone that comes at them. A rat in a hole can be mean enough to hold off a dog.”

  “Good enough, sir,” Clane answered.

  “What about you, Harris?”

  “I lost exactly one heavy, sir. Just one.”

  “Well done. Well done,” I said. I was beginning to hope that we might get through this, but I couldn’t let it go to my head.

  We patched ourselves up, sorted through the dead, threw extra bodies out in the lagoon, and gathered up a significant stockpile of spears, knives, and heavy stones.

  I went to talk to Leeson, who’d been spending all this time keeping an eye on the other forces moving around out there on Green Deck.

  “What have you got for recon, Leeson?” I asked.

  “They’re being tricky out there now,” he said. “I think they’ve caught Della and Cooper—unless they’ve managed to escape. Doesn’t matter. They’re pretty much out of the fight.”

  I nodded. My ghosts had managed to tangle up two units, lowering their numbers by half. Now we only had to face fifty men each in those divided groups, rather than two units, fresh and uninjured, of one hundred men apiece. I’d call that a good trade for two scouts any day.

  “Where’s our trouble spot?” I asked Leeson.

  “I’d say out there where the thickest trees are. There’s at least three units somewhere in those trees, and I haven’t heard a peep out of any of them.”

  I thought about that, and I didn’t like it. Three hundred-plus fresh troops? They were either fighting to the death inside those palms, or they were parlaying—plotting our demise in the shade.

  Taking careful stock of things, I felt a burst of pride. We’d pretty much shattered four units already. Two others had gotten into an altercation on their own.

  But that left the three who were quietly lounging under those trees… Leeson was right. They were our only problem now. They were fresh, and they probably had four times our numbers now. What were they doing out there, in the thickest, most heavily forested region of Green Deck?

  “All right, everybody,” I said, “get back into your hiding spots, pull all the palm fronds back into position. Let’s not let the enemy count heads. I want everybody to have two spears, and I want three or four with the weaponeers at the top. And get that bucket-brigade going again, passing the big stones all the way up to the crown.”

  I joined this last group, sweating and heaving, as rock by rock was dragged up to the top of the hill and stacked into cairns at strategic locations all around the top of my soon-to-be bloody hill. The stones weren’t as effective as the spears, but they still did the job when the thrower’s aim was good.

  We hunkered down and waited.

  “Maybe…” Leeson said, sidling up to me on his haunches.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Just maybe we could consider…” Harris said, coming up from the other side of me, also on his haunches.

  Immediately, I was on guard. These two were either going to assassinate me or perform some kind of chicanery.

  Harris smiled. It was a fake smile, a hopeful one. The kind that showed his teeth but not any form of happiness in his heart.