This case was no exception. Still, we were curious, so Primus Collins and I found our way to the nearest armory. What we found there was amazing.

  “Look, there must be two hundred suits of power-armor down here,” she said. “But all the Mogwa combatants are sick—or dead.”

  While she prattled with her hands on her hips, I nervously watched the reports rolling in. The bears were moving around us even as we discussed the issue.

  “Uh… I’ve got an idea, Primus. Try to squeeze into that one. Yeah, that one right there.”

  She looked at me like I was crazy, but she tried it. The problem was it was just too tight, even for a fairly small female human. Primus Collins couldn’t weigh more than fifty kilos soaking wet, but she still couldn’t fit in the Mogwa battle machine and close the hatch at the same time.

  Climbing out and cursing loudly, she found me already tapping away on my tapper. “What are you up to now?”

  “I’ve got a backup idea. Let’s hope it works out.”

  She rubbed at her chaffed elbows and banged-up knees. She soon stopped that when the personnel I’d called came bouncing down the ramp that led up into the city.

  I’d called the gremlin techs from the Varus support legion—and there were a lot of them. A whole unit’s worth.

  “Hey, guys. Good to see you again.”

  The gremlins hissed and burbled. They didn’t seem to be in a better mood than the last time I’d laid eyes on them. That had been during the bombardment of our forward position a few nights earlier.

  As I waved and smiled, they spread out and advanced.

  “Uh… what’s up, guys?”

  “We’re thinking you should dance, big-man,” said one. He was standing in front of me, cocky and swaggering.

  I knew these sneaky bastards pretty well by now. They liked to distract you from the front and stab you in the rear.

  Whirling around, I sure as shit saw one of them creeping close with a prong and a wire. A favorite form of death they liked to inflict on humans was electrocution. They found it funny how a man jerked and writhed in spasms if he was hit with just the right current.

  Kicking out a big boot, I swept the gremlin away and sent him whirling, ass-over-tea-kettle, across the chamber.

  This elicited more growls and curses. I turned back to the head gremlin and spread my hands wide. The little bastard studied each hand with his eyes, looking for some weapon or trick.

  “Hey now, guys. What’s the trouble? Why are you upset?”

  “Upset? Upset! We’re not upset, big-man, we’re in a rage. A righteous mood of vengeance and recrimination!”

  “Is that so? What exactly is the problem?”

  He pointed a skinny child-like finger at me. “You are the problem. You left us to die back there on the front. To escape, we had to lower ourselves into the Mogwa filth-rivers and wade all the way back here to safety. Now, it is happening again! Are you about to run away a second time?”

  A new voice joined the discussion then. It was Primus Collins. “Hold it right there, gremlin. You’re out of line. I’m the officer in charge of this cohort. McGill didn’t command you to stay there—I did.”

  This created a stir. The gremlins circled and grumbled among themselves. I got the feeling they were chewing over her words very carefully.

  Primus Collins, for her part, didn’t seem to grasp the trouble she was in. She was from Victrix, after all. People in that legion lined up their ducks, counted them three times, and if they didn’t get the same number they started all over again. Officers like her had no idea how the gremlins could get kind of treacherous when the chips were down.

  “Now you listen to me, soldiers,” she said. “McGill brought you down here to give you new fighting machines, courtesy of the Mogwa. You should be grateful to him, instead of pissing and moaning about what happened days ago.”

  The gremlins turned their curious attention to the machines as Collins indicated them with a pointing finger.

  “Those things are useless toys,” their leader said. “They won’t react to the touch of a human, or a—”

  To prove the gremlin wrong, Collins walked over to one of the machines and keyed open the hatch. “See? They’re unlocked. The Mogwa have unlocked all of them for our use. The problem is regular humans are too big to fit inside. Would you like to try?”

  Eager, but as paranoid as squirrels on a birdhouse, they swarmed the machines. Several managed to pop the hatches. They climbed inside, and they started up the engines.

  “Standard controls…” said the leader, whose name was Jink. “So simple. So universal in design.”

  “That’s right,” I said. “The interface should be very natural to operate once you get used to it. Essentially, the machines intelligently interpret your body movements and move with you, just like you’re wearing stilts, or something.”

  Within two minutes, every gremlin was marching around and laughing. At last, the leader came up to us, marching his machine like an expert. It was just like walking, after all. He did it with quick, precise motions. The gremlins were small and weak, but they were very quick of mind and nimble in the body. I could tell they were going to make good pilots—too bad we didn’t have more of them.

  “Big-man,” Jink said. “How is it that you fire this gun on top of the turret? Ah—never mind. I have mastered it!”

  So saying, Jink fired the primary cannon. A boom rang out, and Primus Collins was blown clear out of her shoes. There was nothing left but some feet and fingers.

  “Oh no!” exclaimed the gremlin. “What a tragedy! You must have trained me poorly, big-man!”

  There was a gale of laughter from the rest of them, and they walked around me in a circle.

  I put my big fists on my hips and stared them down. It was like being circled by a pack of jackals.

  “Look,” I said, “I get that you were angry with Collins for ditching you back on the front lines—but we’ve got to move on past all that. You and me—we’re all about to be permed. We have to fight together to have a chance at winning.”

  They studied me, and they rattled at each other in their dark, native speech. I waited to see which way the winds would blow.

  The gremlin leader turned back to me at last. “We will help. We will fight. We will die. But you must promise us something, big-man.”

  “Promise you what?”

  “When you escape this planet mysteriously, you must take us with you.”

  I laughed. “I’m not going anywhere. I’m as stuck here as you guys are.”

  “It would appear so, but we do not believe it. We do not trust. You are as slippery as a sand-eel’s excrement. You even managed to escape our home world when no one believed you could.”

  “Uh… oh yeah, right,” I said, recalling a distant day when I’d slipped out a portal to Earth while pretending to take a piss. “Okay, okay. If I run off and leave this world, I’ll do my best to take you with me. But first, you have to fight! Are you with me?”

  “Yes,” they said, all of them speaking at once in a chorus of sibilant sound. “Lead us! Lead us!”

  Turning around, I stepped over the scorched stain that had once been Primus Collins and walked up the ramps into the city. I called upon my own unit and a half-dozen others.

  Primus Collins was down, but I commanded in her name. I knew she would have wanted it that way.

  We marched to the flanks, and we left our safe entrenched positions. We raced from building to building until we found a column of bears marching past us a few blocks away.

  I started off by having all our light troops climb to high windows, five to ten floors up. They immediately began sniping at the bears, disrupting their columns.

  Now, I knew bear psychology pretty well by this time. They were apex predators on their planet. They were even more naturally aggressive than humans. They were also less of an organized group of pack-hunters, so they tended to lose their tempers if you pestered them enough.

  That was exactly what we did. We shot at them, not penetrating their armor, but managing to knock them off their feet so they bumped their noses on the streets. After a few minutes of this, some commander lost his mind and ordered his men to charge our light troops.

  Naturally, Adjunct Barton and all the light commanders supporting her melted away.

  The bears came on, snarling and rushing headlong into the dark, broken buildings. If you’ve had the displeasure of fighting in a wrecked city, you’ll know what I mean. Torn-up buildings are dangerous places. They’re perfect for ambushing enemy troops—especially if the enemy rushes at you in a disorganized mob.

  I waited until a few hundred of the bears were in full pursuit—then I ordered the gremlins in.

  Mogwa in power-armor advanced, forming a half-circle. They began blazing away with their turrets, which unlike snap-rifles did a fine job of destroying armored bears. They hit the Rigellians so hard, they crushed their bodies with the explosive impacts. Broken-up and bloody, they crawled and mewed—then an unexpected thing happened.

  Without orders, the gremlins leapt out of their combat machines. They raced up with coils of wire, and I’ll be damned if they didn’t jab needles into any crack they could find and jolt the wounded bears to death. The result was grim—but also… it was kind of funny.

  “They dance!” the gremlins squealed and cackled. “They dance, big-man! Watch them, don’t miss a moment of it!”

  I nodded and forced a smile. “That’s real good killing, Jink. But hey… there are a lot more bears out there where this company came from. Let’s go get them.”

  Reluctantly, the gremlins unplugged the bears from their idling engines and mounted up again. They wanted more killing, and I was eager to help them find fresh game.

  -52-

  We fought steadily for the next several hours. If the enemy bears had been more on the ball, they might have swung around and finished us—but they were under strict orders to advance deep into the city. Their commanders wanted to press the advantage they had at all costs.

  The gremlins made them pay dearly. I had to ponder our disproportionate success.

  For one thing, the enemy was distracted, that was a big help, but it wasn’t the only factor. To my mind, the gremlins were just plain better fighters than the Mogwa marines. That was weird given the difference in training levels, but I thought it made sense. The gremlins were vicious killers in their savage little hearts. That was the real truth of it.

  The Mogwa, on the other hand, were more like housecats. They’d lost their predatory edge thousands of years ago. Sure, they could be trained to fight well enough—but it didn’t come naturally to them.

  On top of the ornery nature of the gremlins, Legion Varus tactics helped a bunch. We were much more experienced than any Mogwa captain. Using our skills combined with the natural tendencies of the gremlin pilots, well sir, we tore the bears a new one.

  After we’d logged something like five hundred kills, I got a strange call on my tapper. It was from Primus Graves.

  “Hey!” I said, grinning down into my tiny embedded screen. “Fancy seeing you up and around again, sir. How did you—?”

  “It’s a sordid story,” Graves said. “I’ll talk about it later—if you can tell me how you managed to cut a wedge into the enemy positions and halt their advance in your sector.”

  I gave him my story, and I did it with gusto. Graves listened and nodded his head. “I thought it might be something like that. A good effort, McGill. Too little, too late—but well done, nonetheless.”

  “Uh…” I said, concerned by his lack of good cheer. “What’s the big picture look like, sir? I haven’t had time to check in for hours.”

  “It’s not good. We’re losing this battle. A day, maybe two or three—that will be it. The Mogwa troops are mostly dead or useless. There aren’t enough of us to cover the whole city, and we’re pulling back on every front, including yours. We’ll circle up for a last stand in the center of the city.”

  “But sir, all you have to do is use every near-human cohort’s unit of gremlins. I’ve got the armory codes and everything.”

  “I have those codes now, too. We got them from Sateekas—but it’s not that simple.”

  “Hmm… you never did tell me how you got yourself out of purgatory, sir.”

  Graves chuckled. “I’ll tell you. Why not? We’re all doomed anyway, and it’s kind of funny. Sateekas came to Winslade hours ago and asked him who the best human tactician he knew was, beside himself. Winslade gave him my name.”

  “Ha! Well… he’s right.”

  “Thank you. I thought it was a nice gesture too, when I heard about it. Anyway, the funny part came when Sateekas immediately executed Winslade for incompetence, then ordered that I be revived in his place.”

  We both had to laugh at that. Graves always had a grim sense of humor, mind you. Virtually every time he told a joke, it was about the past, and it was always full of death.

  “So… you’re in charge, now? What happened to that Victrix stuffed-shirt? Tribune Kraus?”

  “He was executed even sooner. Sateekas has been on a tear, gunning down anyone that fails him. As you might imagine, with our troops falling back in every sector, there have been plenty of executions.”

  “Oh yeah… I guess so. Say, has there been any word from the battle fleet?”

  Graves stopped all his smiling and gave me a hard stare. “Why would there be word from the fleet? They ran out on us a week ago. What have you heard, McGill? Did you pull a move of some kind? Something illicit?”

  I rubbed my neck and sighed. “I guess it doesn’t matter much if it didn’t work out.”

  Graves nodded. “I guess not. Thanks for trying in any case. I’m sending out a lifter to pick up your men—all of them. I’ll pass on the suggestion about putting gremlins into power-armor—Lord help us.”

  He signed off, and I ordered my troops to fall back to the LZ. We were all going to have to board the lifter and scramble out of here. It was just as well, as the bears were starting to mass-up nearby. I had the feeling someone in command had decided to wipe us out once and for all.

  When the lifter came, we rushed aboard, and I managed to get all the gremlins aboard with us—those who hadn’t been knocked out by this time.

  After we lifted off, I dumped a bottle of water into my face and drank a second one. Then, I checked the notes on my tapper.

  There were lots of red ones from various officers. I flicked most of them off to the side unread. I didn’t have time for recriminations or demands that I put a real primus into command. What was done was done.

  The gremlin commander came to talk to me during the short flight to the center of the city. We didn’t dare fly high or fast, for fear of being shot down. The ship had to creep between the buildings, sneaking her way into friendly territory.

  “Big-man,” Jink said. “You took us with you, as you promised.”

  “That’s right. I always keep my promises.” This was a bald-faced lie, and we both knew it, but he seemed pleased anyway.

  “We must continue the retreat. We must get off this world. Have you managed to arrange this yet?”

  Frowning, I shook my head. “It’s not that simple, little buddy. We’re going to be redeployed to fight in the inner city. To make a last stand.”

  The gremlin peered at me for a moment. “That is regrettable.”

  His eyes slid to one side for a moment, then back to fix upon mine. That was all the warning I got, but it was all that I needed.

  Whirling and reaching out with my ape-like arms, I grabbed the second little bastard, who sure-as-shit was sneaking up on my six. I didn’t go easy on him. Not this time.

  I know that any field commander in a true starfaring legion had to expect some shenanigans every once in a while. He had to roll with the punches—or in this case, accept a friendly, vengeful electrocution now and then.

  But I wasn’t in the mood, and the timing was bad. Lord only knew when I’d get my next revive if I let these pricks fry me now.

  Accordingly, I grabbed the gremlin by the neck and wrapped my other big fist around his tiny hands. A hot wire was in there, I could feel it buzzing at my gauntlet. I touched it to his chest, and I fried him. I fried him until there was hair burning and the stink of it filled my nostrils.

  Tossing the corpse aside, I turned back to Jink. The gremlin leader looked a mite upset.

  “Did you see him dance?” I laughed. “My hand might have been covering that up—too bad.”

  The gremlin showed me his teeth. “Very funny, big-man. You always did like to play. But you promised, remember? We take such things seriously.”

  “You should, you should. Listen here, if I figure out a way to escape Segin, I’ll let you know first. Until then, this game isn’t over yet. We’re both still in it together.”

  He nodded, and he left me with the stinking corpse of his comrade. I tossed the body away and sank back into my seat. After I was sure there weren’t any more comedians stealthing near, I went back to paging through my messages.

  One of them—only one of them—caught my attention. It was from none other than Galina Turov, and it had been stamped urgent six ways from Sunday. How had I missed that one? It must have gotten buried in the flood.

  Opening it eagerly, I read it, and I felt a rush of surprise. Standing up, I charged down the aisle of the lifter. Several people jerked their feet out of the way—but some were too slow. Those last unfortunates got stomped, and they howled and cursed my name. I waved over my shoulder at them—what else could I do?

  -53-

  Lifters don’t have Gray Decks like bigger ships do—but they do have small science labs. I rushed up to the command deck, then past the revival machines to the lab. Throwing open the door, I had a look around.

  The place was dead empty. I found notes, I rustled through computer scrolls… the last entry in the log was dated three days back. Apparently, the tech running this place had died back then and never been revived.