“Um…” I said, not liking this twist in the direction of the conversation. To me, it sounded like a lover’s spat transforming into a fresh military disaster. I decided to rejoin the conversation before things got out of hand.

  “Imperator?” I asked. “We’ve got about a hundred injured Eagles down here. We’ll be glad to help when they’re transported to the rear lines. But for right now—”

  “I’ll dispatch a platoon of bio people to relieve you of that duty,” Deech said. “For your information, the Eagles did better on almost every front than they did in your little pit. Fike’s fateful charge started at your post, and turned into an instant disaster. In many similar battles, they broke out and pushed the enemy back with acceptable losses.”

  While we’d been talking, I’d located Winslade in the flesh. He was leaning against a steaming pile of wreckage with his helmet sealed and his eyes studying the pocked ceiling.

  He spotted me, and his sour expression tightened so much I had to wonder if he’d stunk up his own suit.

  “Well?” Deech demanded. “I’m waiting for your response, Centurion.”

  Catching Winslade’s eye, I made kissing motions with my face, hoping against hope he’d smooth her ruffled feathers.

  Now, I knew Winslade had it in him to be a kiss-up. The man was a born brown-noser—but today, he just wasn’t in the mood.

  “Fine,” he spat out. “We’ll do it. We’ll show the Eagles how to clear out a nest of insects.”

  “Excellent,” Deech purred. “That’s a better response than I’d hoped for. Perhaps there’s hope for you yet, Centurion. Take an hour to regroup and prepare, then push the enemy back. Don’t let Fike’s sacrifice be in vain. Deech out.”

  The channel went dead, and I slumped up against the same wall of debris Winslade was propping up with his skinny frame.

  “Jeezus…” I said. “Sir? Do you know what we’ve just been ordered to do?”

  “Die,” he said. “We’re to die like pigs.”

  “Why the hell would you push for that?” I demanded. “What the hell good will it do?”

  He gave me a sneering smile. “It will deepen the hole she’s digging for herself. The way I see it, I can’t lose. I’ve lost all favor with Deech anyway, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

  I snorted. “Yeah. She’s entertaining Drusus now. She does like moving up!”

  “Exactly. Now, if we take this assignment, and we fail, and a dozen other pushes fail… do you think she’ll keep her job long?”

  I thought about that. “Probably not. Drusus is distracted, but he’s a sensible man. He won’t stand for constant failure.”

  “Precisely. Deech rose high, which pushed all the rest of us down. Turov, you, and me. If she were to stumble…”

  “You can’t be serious,” I said, as I began to grasp the depths of his plan. “You plan to fight and lose this whole thing? Just so you might get your rank back?”

  He shrugged. “It might not happen that way. We might win. The Eagles were fools, after all. They advanced arrogantly—but they also took out a lot of the enemy. Perhaps we can win where they failed.”

  “Hmm… and to your thinking, whether we lose this brave fight or win it, we come out better in the end?” I asked.

  “It’s worth a try. All my sponsors from high places have forsaken me. I have to regain their favor—either that, or reshuffle the deck, hoping for better cards.”

  I shook my head bemusedly. I was a schemer, a liar, and a rogue element on any battlefield. But I’d never hatched schemes the way Winslade and Turov liked to do.

  “Well?” Winslade said, eyeing me closely. “Are you going to help me, or not?”

  For a few seconds, I squinted at him, and he squinted back.

  “We’re committed now…” I said, thinking it over. “But if we’re going to do it, we have to do it on our terms.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “We have to attack immediately. Not in an hour from now, or a day. We have to move out right away while those bugs are still scrambling to cover all the other places where they lost ground. They’re probably pulling troops out of this passageway, since they think they won. If we hit them now…”

  Winslade looked alarmed, but after he thought it over he shrugged.

  Sucking in a deep breath, he nodded.

  “All right then, we’ll attack immediately.”

  I put a single finger up to stop him as he began to relay the order.

  “Hold on. Let me make one call first. We need an ace in the hole.”

  His eyes narrowed again. He didn’t seem to have any idea what I had planned. That wasn’t surprising as the idea had just popped into my head at that moment.

  “Very well,” he said. “You’re right—we do need an edge.”

  -33-

  After several long minutes, I still hadn’t managed to get through to Turov. I could tell she wasn’t interested—but I had to get her to listen, so I fought dirty.

  She’d ignored my texts, my calls, and all attempts to join her command channel. Getting desperate, I sent her a simple text:

  What Drusus really said.

  That’s all I typed, in a blank message. That was just the subject, the teaser. Four simple words that would splash up on her tapper as she scrolled by.

  It was bait—and it worked.

  “McGill?” she demanded less than thirty seconds after I’d sent her the message. “Why are you irritating me with these illicit attempts to make contact? Are you unaware of the pitched battle going on all around you?”

  “Tribune!” I boomed in greeting. “So glad you could spare the time. Have you been briefed on recent events in our sector?”

  “What has this got to do with Drusus?”

  “Everything, sir. Let me explain.”

  “Why would Drusus have said anything to you at all?” she demanded. “We left Earth a month ago.”

  The woman was full of suspicion. In this case, her worst fears were true, but it wasn’t time to tell her about my meeting with Drusus. Not yet.

  “Listen, sir. Deech has ordered my unit to charge into the same death trap her man Fike just enjoyed. Were you aware of that?”

  “What? You’re under my operational command!”

  “That’s right, sir,” I said. “But Deech saw fit to bypass the Varus brass this time out. We’ve been ordered to launch another offensive—using only Varus troops this time—in the next few minutes.”

  “That’s unconscionable!” she complained. “The enemy has shown overwhelming superiority in your sector. Why would she order such a thing?”

  “Well… if you think about it for a moment, the answer might come to you.”

  This is where I depended on the devious nature of my opponent. Often, a person like Galina Turov was able to imagine worse motives for anyone’s behavior than I could possibly come up with.

  “Hmm… maybe she wants to prove Varus can’t do any better than the Eagles.”

  “That sounds good,” I said. “I mean, it sounds reasonable. But you and I have a different goal in this situation: we need it all to blow up in her face.”

  “Right!” Galina said, catching on. “If it’s a massive disaster, a bloody kilometer of death, she can’t shirk the blame. After all, she ordered both attacks.”

  “And even better, if it’s a winner, if Varus breaks through, we will look like winners.”

  “Yes…” she said. “That must be why she ordered Varus troops to stand aside the first time. She didn’t want me to get any credit for a victory here. If the Iron Eagles could have done it alone, she would have gotten another medal.”

  “That’s all out the window now. Her back-up move is to prove it wasn’t her fault.”

  “We have to make it her fault… Now I see why you called me—but you’ve yet to explain your reference to Drusus.”

  “Listen, I think we can set this up so that if Varus wins or loses, we can still come out of this in good shape.”

  “All right, I’m following all this, McGill. But why do you need to contact me about it? Just go out there and do it—or fail dramatically. It hardly matters which you manage to pull off as long as you go big.”

  “Toward that goal,” I told her, “it would be great if you could contact Graves and ask him to throw in more weight behind us. With a single unit, it’s hard to change the course of this war.”

  She was quiet for a minute, but then she finally answered. “All right. You’ll have more troops. Turov out.”

  The channel had closed. I turned to Winslade, who’d gathered up our hundred-odd surviving Varus troops while I was sweet-talking Galina. They all wore bewildered expressions.

  “Turov is sending reinforcements,” I told him.

  “Excellent.”

  Winslade and I gave each other the thumbs up.

  A few minutes later, supporting troops began rolling in. In fact, we got more than I’d bargained for. Not only were there now two additional units at our back, but Graves himself was leading them.

  “McGill…” he said, “and Winslade… Why don’t you two seem surprised to see me?”

  “I am, sir!” I said in a bright tone. “It’s like my birthday has come early!”

  “Same,” Winslade said, but in a decidedly sour tone.

  “Hmm…” Graves said, brushing past us to the front line. “Get your apes to slide this door open. We’re to attack immediately.”

  “I’m on it, Primus!” I said, and I signaled the heavy troopers.

  “Take point, McGill,” Graves ordered, immediately assuming command. “Scout that hellhole. I want your platoon a hundred meters ahead of the main column.”

  This wasn’t my dream scenario, but I didn’t hesitate. I waved for my light troopers to follow, and they did so with obvious fear in their faces.

  I couldn’t blame them. They were still pretty green, and the passage was choked with bodies, both human and alien alike.

  “Cooper, Gomez, Lucas—take the lead,” I ordered.

  Cooper trotted by with the others, and as he did so he couldn’t help but make a comment.

  “If I live for the next hour, Adjunct,” he said, “will you sponsor me for rank when we get home?”

  After a second’s thought, I nodded. “All right. Consider yourself a regular in training—but only if we both live.”

  “Good enough!”

  The kid raced ahead of the scouting trio. It was almost like he wanted to die—but then I noted something. He paused to search a pile of debris. Lucas and Gomez passed him by, and Cooper never seemed to catch up after that.

  I had to smile. He was doing the best he could with a bad hand of cards, pushing up his odds of survival in a subtle way. I couldn’t fault him for that.

  When the scouts were about thirty meters ahead, the rest of my platoon advanced. I’d never seen such a pack of nervous nellies. They were so jumpy, if a corpse so much as slid sideways as they brushed by, they jumped half out of their skins.

  “Contact!” a female voice called out up ahead.

  It wasn’t Cooper, it was Gomez—and she didn’t sound happy. I opened my mouth to ask what she had seen on tactical chat—but before I could get a word out, her name began fluttering red on my HUD.

  Firing erupted in the dark ahead of us. We had our suit lights, but there wasn’t any other good source of lighting. Turning on night vision was an option, but if we did that and the heavy troopers behind us unloaded with some of their energy weapons we might be blinded.

  In the corpse-filled dark, two blazing streams of snap-rifle fire were going off at the same time, converging on the ceiling, then moving down to the deck.

  At this point, I had a few options. I’d sent three troopers ahead to flush out the enemy, and they’d done so. By no means did that commit me to rushing to their aid. If they died, well, that’s pretty much the purpose of light trooper scouts in the legions.

  So, I could either advance, retreat, or lay down supporting fire. A retreat wasn’t realistic, not with only one man down so far. Running now was out of the question.

  I would normally opt to lay down supporting fire, but we couldn’t see what our scouts were shooting at from this range. The passage was choked with the dead and other loose debris.

  “Platoon advance, quick-march!” I ordered. “Graves, looks like we’ve made contact with… something.”

  “Roger that, McGill,” Graves said, and his tone was almost bored.

  We advanced quickly to support our scouts.

  “Something reached down from the ceiling and grabbed Gomez,” Lucas told me. “I think it was a wounded Vulbite.”

  “It lopped Gomez’s head right off,” Cooper said. “She never had a chance.”

  I quickly examined the scene.

  “Looks like this Vulbite had been hanging out here for a while,” I said, “left for dead. He got in one good snip with those big curved mouth-parts of his before he croaked. So far, we’re going one-for-one. We’re improving on the Eagles score already! Sarah, join Cooper and Lucas on point.”

  Sarah sucked in her breath sharply, but she didn’t argue.

  She was kind of a special case. She had been a light trooper, a fresh recruit on Rogue World. She and I had even met up after the deployment was over for a brief, happy time.

  She’d made regular after that campaign, but her actions back on Rogue World—which involved shooting Harris in the back of the head on a bad day—had kept her from moving into the armored platoons, or getting a specialist rank.

  Putting Sarah on point might seem mean, but it was the best way in Varus to get noticed and advanced.

  “On it, sir,” she said, and she sprang ahead.

  Startled by her energetic rush forward, Cooper and Lucas trotted after her.

  We’d gone pretty far in when Graves contacted me. “I’m coming in behind you. Keep advancing and reporting. Only one incident so far?”

  “That’s right, sir,” I said. “If I had to guess, I’d say the Vulbites have pulled out of this sector to defend other areas where the Eagles made more progress.”

  “Outstanding. Keep advancing.”

  I could tell he was in the mood to push our luck. That was a fine thought to have when you were in the center of several hundred armed troops. For me, it was a little harder to feel confident about.

  After we’d gone maybe five hundred meters in, the bodies and other signs of battle gave out. We were now in an open passageway. Closed hatches stood in rows on both sides of us. They were mute testimonials to another possible ambush.

  “This is going well, McGill,” Graves said from behind me. “I’m going to push our luck. Head all the way to the end of the sector where your first stronghold was. We’ll be one step from the outer hull at that point.”

  Trying not to think about it, I acknowledged and ordered my troops to continue the advance. We walked fast, bouncing along in the low gravity.

  Behind us, I couldn’t even see the suit lights of our heavy troops any longer.

  “Walking pace,” I ordered my lights. They obeyed with relief. “Keep advancing, and aim your snouts into every nook and cranny. Kivi?”

  She came up and asked me what was on my mind.

  Kivi was a specialist, my only tech in the platoon. She hadn’t really been thrilled to be attached to a light platoon, but she liked being under my command.

  “Adjunct?” she said. “I’ve got nothing on the buzzers.”

  “You missed that last Vulbite.”

  “Yeah, he was probably cloaked or something. The readings are confusing in here—there are too many bodies.”

  “Right, but we just passed the battlefield. It’s wide open up here. Give me another sweep ahead.”

  I kept walking with Kivi at my side. Ahead, I could see Cooper and the other scouts. They were still advancing, meeting no resistance.

  All that changed just as we were about to breathe a long-held collective sigh.

  When the attack came, it didn’t come from an expected direction. We were scanning with rifles to our shoulders and eyes on our sights in every direction—except one.

  We’d examined the deck, the ceiling, the walls and hatches—but no one was looking behind us.

  Vulbites are sneaky creatures. To my mind, they’re about the best at quiet hunting I’d ever met up with. It wasn’t just their stealth-suits, either. It was in the nature of every attack they made.

  Never to my knowledge had the Vulbites lined up in a trench or something similar then charged in organized ranks. They liked to slide around out of sight and lunge from the dark, like predators snatching unwary prey. I’d even noticed that the lighting systems were not only powered down, they’d been destroyed. Every light panel in the passage was broken.

  So, when they appeared behind us, we were taken by surprise. They must have been stealthed, probably clinging to the ceiling in their shimmering cloaks that bent what little light there was.

  The rear rank went down hard. I was walking with the leaders, so I didn’t get hit first, but about six of my people were down and out before we realized what was happening.

  Whirling around, we blazed our guns down the long passage, shooting on full-auto. Sparks flew, showering every inch of the enclosed space with rapid-fire accelerated slivers of metal. Fortunately, snap-rifles held a thousand rounds in a magazine, so we could afford sustained fire.

  Several Vulbites were struck, and a few of the dying wounded were taken out as well. My troops were green, and they were more than a little freaked-out by this point. They chopped down their friends, the looming insectile enemy, and damned-well anything else that got between the muzzles of their guns and the clinging darkness of the passage.

  It was all over in less than a minute. Cooper and Sarah had rushed back to us by that time. They examined the carnage with us.

  “What’s your read, Veteran Moller?” I asked.

  The squat woman was crouched over the bodies. “They’re all gone, sir. Six lights, and four Vulbites. We got off easy.”

  “Yeah…” I said, nodding. “The enemy have drained their numbers from this region, clearly. They must be defending other regions in force.”