“Roger that.” Her voice and her connection were gone. I knew she was stealthing. I hoped it worked against these aliens. I seemed to remember the Crystals weren’t really concerned about our stealth tech when we were fighting their drones. I wondered if the alien civilians themselves had similar abilities to detect humans that weren’t visible by normal human standards.

  “Okay, unit,” I said, making an announcement over the tactical chart. “We’ve had our first casualty. I want everybody on alert. Keep your eyes open and your weapons hot. Check your six every five seconds. We have no idea what happened to Cooper—he’s just plain gone.”

  -33-

  Suddenly, I sensed a large stinky presence on my own six. “You should destroy that village, McGill,” Raash said. “I do not understand why you hesitate. Any rational predator would have struck the moment the enemy was spotted.”

  “Because they’re civilians, Raash,” I told him. “Not all aliens are combatants, and they haven’t shown any hostile intent. By the Legion’s standard rules of engagement, I have no cause to harm them.”

  Raash pointed a long-clawed finger downslope to the west. “Is that sufficient cause?” he asked.

  Following his gesture, I saw strange humping shapes. It was almost as if the ground itself were boiling up, then flattening out again. I knew in an instant what it had to be. The enemy slug-creatures were coming toward us, upslope. They’d probably encircled this entire hill by now.

  “Your foolishness will get us all killed! What crime did I commit in my egg to deserve such a monkey-brained leader!”

  Alarmed and worried that Raash might be right, I contacted Kivi and Natasha. I messaged them directly and asked if they’d gotten the second gateway posts going yet. They were about a kilometer away, on another hilltop. They informed me they were having trouble with it. The coordinate settings seemed to go to a destination point they were unfamiliar with, rather than Scorpio’s Gray Deck.

  “Don’t worry about that,” I said. “They’ve been changing things on us all along at the high end of this command chain. Just align them, turn them on, and let’s see what the hell walks through.”

  “Having a little trouble, McGill?” asked an unwelcome voice.

  Another man stood to my side. It was none other than Tribune Maurice Armel. He was a tough-minded but foppish sort, with a whispery mustache and a permanently engraved sneer on his face. He was so French in both looks and attitude, it was kind of cringe-worthy.

  “Ah,” I said, spotting him, “about time you showed up. I noticed you didn’t come through the gateway at the head of your legion.”

  Armel snorted at me. “The very concept is absurd. I sent a full cohort of these lizards through first to see if it was safe. Just like your Primus Graves—I don’t see him here yet.”

  I had to concede the point, so I moved on. “Armel, we’ve got enemies coming up this hill. At least, I don’t think they’re part of the neighborhood welcome-wagon.”

  “And you, of course, want my Saurian troops to intercede?”

  There was gunfire going off now. My troops hadn’t yet been ordered to fire upon the advancing horde of slug-creatures, but I found it difficult to fault their presumption.

  “Permission to fire belchers, sir?” Leeson asked.

  “All right, fire off your belchers, but not at the village. No mortaring that village, either.”

  Leeson cursed a bit, but he didn’t argue. A lot of heavy beaming noises began to come from the front line, the top of the ridge, which was less than a hundred meters distance from the gateway posts where Armel and I stood having our conversation.

  Armel checked his tapper. “According to my drone feed,” he said, “there are better than a thousand of the enemy. You will soon be overwhelmed, even if they don’t have ranged weaponry.”

  “All right, all right,” I said. “Get your lizards up here. We could use some help.”

  “Ah! There, that’s it! The fearful request for aid that I’ve been expecting. Could you possibly put a ‘please’ on top of that?”

  I gritted my teeth. This guy just couldn’t make anything easy for anyone.

  “Please…” I said in a growling voice.

  He beamed a big smile at me as if he’d scored some kind of point. Then he made a sweeping gesture with his arm.

  Almost instantly, something like two hundred Saurian troops rushed up from the valley where I’d been sending them this entire time. Two full units appeared, and there was no way he hadn’t set them all up for this dramatic shithead moment.

  The lizards took up flanking positions around my own troops, and everybody squeezed in together on the hilltop. The firing soon intensified. The Saurian troops seemed to have brought mostly short-range shotgun-type weaponry, something suitable for fighting enemies in stardust armor like the Rigellians—or possibly crystalline drones.

  I had to figure, though, that their guns should work well on these dirt-creatures.

  “There you go,” Armel said. “You have your reinforcements.”

  I nodded and trotted to the front lines.

  At first, the battle was something of a turkey shoot. The enemy seemed to lack ranged weaponry entirely. This made sense, as the village they’d come from seemed to be a civilian settlement. Our attackers clearly weren’t military in nature. Hopefully, that meant they wouldn’t be as difficult to injure as the crystal drones had been back on Jungle World.

  Still, watching plasma bolts pop small chunks of rock and dirt off them, I had to admit they were still tougher than any human that had ever lived. They also moved quickly, and they seemed very determined.

  “You see this bullshit right here?” Harris began telling me. “If one ant from another colony walks into a colony full of ants that are hostile to him, why, they’d all go berserk and tear his ass apart, right? Sure, you’ve got your soldier ants, but that doesn’t mean the workers won’t attack just as fiercely.”

  “What’s your point, Harris?”

  “This enemy… they don’t have civvies. Not really. No more than an ant colony has civvies.”

  I turned away from him and watched the battle going on downslope. If you could call it a battle. We were gunning them down as fast as we could, but still, they kept humping forward. There were broken-off chunks of the creatures that looked like gemstones or lumps of dirty quartz. Every time we shot one, bits like that flew away from the enemy aliens. Their bodies dribbled dirt the way ours leaked blood, too.

  In order to stop one completely, it seemed like you had to blow about half of its mass away from the rest of its body. At that point, it was no longer capable of locomotion.

  The slaughter seemed like a sickening waste, but there wasn’t anything in the hearts of these aliens other than a fierce desire to reach our lines and destroy us.

  Harris himself moved up to the ridgeline, and he aimed his heavy morph-rifle. He began firing off shots rapidly into the approaching forms. He laughed as he did so, clearly enjoying himself. There was nothing more delightful than a helpless enemy to Adjunct Harris. He liked winning—especially if he was winning easily.

  But then, just as I began to think we had matters cleanly in hand, the situation changed. The gateway posts in the midst of our encampment were undergoing some kind of adjustment by Kivi. I had to think that Natasha had probably ordered her here to get her out of her hair on that second hill.

  Whatever the case, the posts which we’d so carefully set up upon our arrival were suddenly disrupted. There was a loud buzz and a snapping sound. The post on the right ceased functioning.

  One of the posts suddenly jumped into the frigging air. An electrical arc jolted up between the post and the rocky ground, startling everyone. It burned like a lightning bolt.

  This electrical arc went right through Kivi, who was right there, kneeling on the hilltop with her tools out. She was blown to a smoldering heap by the discharge.

  “Holy shit…” I said, stunned.

  How had the enemy…?

  A Saurian trooper had been traversing between the posts at that very moment. He was just one of thousands who were lined up to march through the gateway—but it wasn’t his lucky day.

  The poor lizard’s body was sheared in half when the posts were disrupted. Half of his body was left back on his transport ship, and half was here. That was the kind of thing that happened when the connection between two sets of posts failed unexpectedly.

  There was a splattering sound, and gore flew everywhere. It was as if a bucket of paint had exploded. It was enough to make a grown man wince.

  “What the hell happened?” Harris demanded. He was at my side, gaping at the scene. “How’d they get all the way up here to our posts?”

  “Foolish humans,” Raash admonished us, pointing at the ground. “See that hump in the dirt? They dig. They’ve dug up into our midst!”

  It was true. There was a hump now, a hump of earth that was at least a half meter higher than the flat ground the posts had been sitting upon. One of those posts had been lifted up into the air, which had disconnected it from its brother. The resulting discharge had killed two of our troops within less than a second’s time.

  The sinister hump transformed into one of the alien Silicoids. It reared up to confront the hundreds of troops that surrounded it. More humps were here and there.

  “Over there, you see that?” Raash pointed. “There’s another one!”

  There were at least six, seven… no, eight of them now.

  “Heavies!” I shouted. “Pull back from the walls. Move to the center. Form a reserve. Kill every hump you see. Lance it with your force blades. No shooting, no grenades. We don’t want any blue-on-blue, here.”

  Well-disciplined, Harris’s group pulled back from the ridgeline where they’d been firing and cackling at the approaching enemy hordes. They gathered in the middle and began stabbing at the growing humps of earth.

  Somehow, the Silicoid creatures were capable of moving themselves through loose ground. It seemed like they weren’t appearing where there was a hard, rocky slab, but only in areas with loose gravel and dirt.

  Fortunately, their sneak attacks weren’t a super-fast process. When they moved underground, they seemed to move with much less speed than when they humped over the surface. That gave us time to spot one, run over to the spot, and stab and hack at it with force blades, tearing chunks off the beast before it could break through and attack.

  Occasionally, one of these invaders sank back down again with a hissing, foul stench. Then the ground would revert to being nothing but simple dirt again. But in most cases, they forced themselves upward, seeming only to accelerate. Our attacks only goaded them into faster action—or even a berserker rage.

  The men squared-off, fighting with the Silicoids. The aliens reached out with pods, smashing at my troops and forming rocky fangs at the top of their bodies. I supposed these openings in the monsters might be considered a mouth—or perhaps better termed would be a maw.

  They attempted to lunge and bite. Occasionally, this was successful. If a troop was unable to dodge, or if he tripped and fell and was caught, he was often doomed. They latched onto legs—or worse, heads.

  I watched as a light trooper, taken by surprise on the ridge, was swallowed, squalling until he disappeared into one of those maws. Such attacks were almost always fatal, even though other troops gathered around trying to help. They cursed and stabbed and tore at the monsters. But they were rarely able to kill it before limbs were severed from the victim. This left troops to die, screaming in a churning puddle of mud and gore.

  “You see this?” Harris said to me. “I told you we should have bombed that village first thing!”

  I frowned and did not respond. I had to admit, Raash and Harris might have been right in the end. This wasn’t the kind of enemy I was used to. It was the furthest thing from a mammal, and not even along the same evolutionary path as a reptile. No, even an insect would have been more relatable.

  These Silicoids, as the Nairb Seven called them, weren’t even carbon-based. They didn’t drink water, and I doubted they felt pain. The Wur seemed normal by comparison.

  They had to be the most alien enemy I’d yet to encounter.

  -34-

  The Saurians really had to flood in to help us before the battle was finished. Armel had ordered his first cohort, which was finely organized and ready to participate functionally in the battle, to sweep around and flank east. Once in position, they charged and went into close combat with the numerous, dirt-humping slugs that were rolling uphill at us. Surprised by our determined resistance, the last of the villagers broke and fled.

  Armel and I surveyed the damage when the battle was over. He was walking around executing the last living, flopping villagers by setting off plasma grenades on their bodies.

  I didn’t like this much, and I rushed up to him, shouting and waving my hands. “Hey, hey, hey!” I yelled. “What are you doing?”

  “Finishing the job that they started, McGill.”

  “Hey, Tribune, I know you don’t want me to tell you your business—”

  “Finally, you speak words I agree with. You are highly intuitive in this particular instance.”

  “Well, sir… I just gotta say, these are technically civvies. At least they’re what passes for a civvy on this strange planet. We really shouldn’t—”

  He held up a gloved hand in my face. “Cease speaking, Centurion. I’m already sick of your sniveling. I’ve heard it all before, and I refuse to hear it again. These aliens aren’t a harmless species of rodent, or sweet birds of paradise. Nor are they even as unlovely as a Nairb, or as disgusting as the spider-like Mogwa. No, they are further from us than even the Wur. At least plant-creatures have multicellular body structures. They may not have brains, most of them, but you can talk to them after a fashion. Not so with these beasts!”

  He kicked the squirming pile of ash and dirt at his feet. A tendril of smoke came up from the dead alien. It had finally given up the ghost. “Your sympathies are completely misplaced with this strange Silicoid being. If it is alive at all, in even a technical sense, I assure you it feels no pain. It has no anguish. It probably doesn’t even have any young to speak of.”

  “You don’t know any of that, sir,” I said, getting angry. “We don’t know enough about these aliens to write them off as devils.”

  “Surely you jest! Must I demonstrate?”

  “Uh…”

  He didn’t wait for an answer. He walked over to another alien that was flopping about. “Here, here’s another one. It’s not dead yet, McGill. Have a fruitful discussion with it. I will watch.”

  “Uh…”

  “Well? Go on! I have already prepared myself to be astounded.”

  I scratched a bit, having no clue as to how to proceed. He threw his hands high and walked away, grumbling.

  I knelt by the flopping, mortally wounded alien. I did have to admit I had no idea how to talk to it. I tried the Imperial translator buried in my tapper, an app that was generally successful in allowing me to converse with any alien species in the Empire. That covered most of the galaxy at large—but this thing was an exception.

  My tapper didn’t even recognize whatever rasping sounds it was making. It sounded like two stones grating on one another. Were those words? I had no idea.

  Nor could I detect any radio transmissions, organized releases of gas… nothing. I tried scanning for patterns of stinks. I tried drawing a few symbols on the ground with sticks. I tried it all.

  These guys were even harder to talk to than the Machine World aliens had been. I’d attempted to communicate with those guys, and I’d eventually succeeded—but that was long ago. The Machine World aliens were essentially sentient robots of a primitive sort. You could scratch pictograms into the ground to get some kind of conversation going with them. But with this thing, a pile of moving dirt, I wasn’t sure how to even begin.

  I remembered the Wur. I’d spoken to them, too. You essentially had to set up a blood transfusion to talk to those guys.

  With my hands on my hips, I sensed—and then smelled—a foul presence behind me. “Hey Raash,” I said, “you got any ideas?”

  “Yes,” Raash said, “I always have excellent ideas. In this instance, I recommend that you humans retire and return to Earth.”

  “Yeah? Why’s that?”

  “It has become obvious to me from today’s battle that you are an inefficient and ineffective force against these aliens.”

  “What are you talking about? We whooped their asses good enough from what I can see.”

  “Is it not obvious? Even someone such as yourself, who possesses the brain of a lemur, should have come to certain realizations by now.”

  “Spell it out for me, Raash.”

  He helpfully lifted up a fist full of claws. He began flicking up one claw at a time, flipping his long, curved talons in my direction as he spoke. “Firstly, I have heard great tell of how dangerous these Crystal aliens were on Jungle World. How you were nearly defeated by them. Now, we have met them in battle, and we have brushed them all aside.”

  I opened my mouth to object, but he had already flicked out a second talon. This was effectively his middle finger, and it was up in my face as he spoke. “Secondly, you have been told not to wear metal, and yet you all have metal weapons. Our Saurian troops are much more effective. We employ simple beam tubes, with barely any metal content at all. Our harnesses are leather. And with our diamond-reinforced talons, we were able to rip apart the enemy. We can fight them almost on an equal basis. Two Saurians in hand-to-hand are always enough to destroy a single Silicoid.”

  He was bragging, of course. I knew this to be false. I’d seen five, six, even eight Saurians at a time, all tearing at the same Silicoid. Frequently, they’d lost one of their own in the process, too.

  I put my hands on my hips and glared at him.

  “Lastly,” Raash said, flipping up his third finger, “you have been whimpering nonstop about the natural butchery of battle. Who would not finish off an enemy such as this? Something so alien it deserves not even my urine!”