There was one other thing. The soldier who did most of the explaining kept talking about amazing riches. If they could tap a honey depot and call in the transport dirigibles, making it back to the spaceport in the North Pole Region, they would all be wealthy beyond their dreams.

  “I’ll buy a harem,” the soldier said.

  “I’ll never be sober again,” another said.

  “I’ll invest and buy a cohort or two, expanding my riches with another successful raid,” a third chimed in.

  “Quiet in the ranks,” Gricks shouted. “Keep watching for hostiles. They’re out there. Especially keep watch in the higher trees for any kind of apes. The Doom Gibbons carry explosive backpacks. They’re deadly if they get close. Shoot them on sight before they detonate among us.”

  “Detonate,” Dravek said. “What’s he talking about?”

  “Suicide gibbons,” a soldier said. “The Honey Men train them. They’re bastards.”

  “The gibbons?” asked Dravek.

  “No, the Honey Men,” the soldier said. “The richest are the oldest. Some say the oldest are more than five hundred years old. Those are the evilest and the most cunning of the breed. Better the gibbons blow you to shit than you fall into one of the Old Ones’ hands.”

  “Five hundred years old?” asked Dravek. “You expect me to believe that?”

  “Why wouldn’t you?” the soldier said. “It’s what makes the honey so valuable. You live forever if you keep eating it. Why do you think I came to Gath in the first place? Everyone in the Heydell Cloud dreams of buying or stealing jars of Life Honey. It’s immortality for sale. Don’t pretend that’s not why you’re here.”

  “Less talk,” Gricks shouted. “More watch.”

  Maddox nudged an elbow into Dravek’s side. Then he indicated with his eyes the higher trees.

  “You see something?” Dravek asked.

  “Not yet,” Maddox said. “If we want to live through this, though, I think we’d both better watch.”

  Dravek raised his gaze as the cohort continued to advance through the dense jungle.

  “I hope Gricks can read his compass and map right,” Dravek said.

  “Amen to that,” Maddox said, who had started to wonder why they hadn’t run into any real pathfinders yet.

  -33-

  Ten minutes later, Gricks called a halt. He spoke to an aide, pushing the map in the other’s face, using a finger to trace places and routes, no doubt. They whispered together. Soon, Gricks led the group to change their direction of travel.

  Maddox had guzzled from a canteen. Dravek and he had relieved some of the dead of theirs. The water had an odd taste. It was from the purification tablets dropped into the water earlier.

  As the cohort marched, Maddox brushed aside a huge frond leaf. He could feel the water draining out his pores and drank again. Dravek nudged him and handed him a salt pill.

  “Better give me another.”

  Dravek did.

  Maddox washed them down with a gulp of water.

  The cohort continued through the gloomy underworld, everyone watching the fern and frond tops and spying some truly gargantuan trees. Birds screamed. Insects trilled constantly. Sometimes unseen animals shrieked. How big was the jungle?

  “This is the Highlands?” Maddox asked a soldier.

  He was a small bent man with a white streak in his otherwise black hair. He seemed too old to be a soldier and had a deformed walk. His backpack dwarfed him.

  “That’s what I’m told,” the old soldier said.

  Maddox might have asked more. His intuitive sense alerted him. He looked around, feeling hostile eyes watching him…from higher up. He scanned the tallest foliage. There were dark shapes up there. He could feel their gazes burning into him.

  Maddox raised his spring rifle, using the iron sights to aim at the most offensive blot. He squeezed the trigger. The spring released and pushed the hidden piston, which exhaled the lead bullet with driving air. The bullet slapped through fronds and fern leaves on its way up, the contacts messing with its original trajectory. Maddox worked the rifle bolt. The bolt was a bit stiff. It needed a dab of grease when he had the chance. He put another bullet in the chamber and compressed the heavy-duty spring. He fired again at a different dark blot. This time, no leaves or fronds interfered.

  An apish scream sounded—a horrible sound. A dark shape crashed from above, hitting frond and fern leaves on its way down.

  “Incoming!” a soldier shouted.

  “Get down!” Gricks shouted.

  The furry creature hit the jungle floor with a thud. The camouflage pack on its back detonated. Shrapnel ripped through heavy leaves and struck tree trunks.

  “What kind of Hell World is this?” Dravek said. “Suicide apes? Is this for real?”

  “Get off your asses,” Gricks shouted. “The attack was premature. Keep watching for more gibbons. They’re up there, waiting for a signal.”

  Maddox shook his head as he climbed to his feet. How had it helped the cohort that he’d killed the gibbon? Maybe it helped because the explosive pack had blasted on the jungle floor and not in midair. Shrapnel might have found human targets then.

  Maddox continued with the rest of the cohort as he watched the upper forest. The soldiers walked in a long line, picking their way through the jungle.

  Suddenly, from above, came wild screams. Leaves thrashed and thirty or so long-limbed, furry creatures swung through the trees. They moved fast, swinging down at the cohort. Each gibbon had a camouflaged pack strapped onto his furry back.

  Soldiers raised their spring rifles and fired a volley. Two gibbons fell. One hit a tree trunk and exploded, tearing a heavy branch from the trunk.

  Soldiers cranked their bolts, sending up volley after volley.

  More gibbons fell, some screaming in agony as they did. The rest swung fast, zeroing in on the cohort of desperately firing soldiers.

  A dead gibbon struck the ground between several soldiers. The explosion hurled the soldiers to the ground, two of them dead, one bellowing as blood poured from his stomach.

  Pops sounded as men fired their spring rifles.

  “Aim, you fools,” Gricks shouted. “Pick the gibbons off before they direct their explosives among us.”

  More shot gibbons fell. Others hurled themselves at knots of cohort soldiers.

  The explosions of their packs became constant for a time. Soldiers screamed and fell to the ground, hit. Others sobbed with terror. A few continued their aimed fire, Maddox and Dravek among them.

  Foliage came down from too many explosions. There was a fire to the left. A mighty tree crashed, crushing fronds and ferns in its path. More suicide gibbons appeared, hurling themselves upon the cohort from above.

  “Stand up,” Gricks shouted. “Shoot to kill. Either you kill these gibbons now or we’re all dead.”

  “The hell with this.” Maddox dropped his spring rifle and tore out his blaster. He used it with precision, sweeping his arm and killing one gibbon after another. Some of their packs exploded right then in the higher foliage. Maddox killed ten gibbons in half as many seconds.

  Soldiers stood around Maddox, amazed at his weapon.

  Gricks hustled near, pushing soldiers out of his way. “Well, well, well, special scouts, is it? You’re the tribune’s special men. Why didn’t you say so in the first place?”

  “You were doing fine as it was, Centurion,” Maddox said.

  “Right,” Gricks said. “You’re no amateur, are you?”

  “The farthest thing from an amateur,” Maddox said.

  Gricks turned, shouting orders at what was left of the cohort. A good two hundred soldiers collected their gear, water and helped those they could, giving powerful narcotics to the dying, bandaging others. Then they continued to work past dense foliage, hacking vines or pushing creepers aside. Unfortunately, the way became even thicker and harder.

  “This is an awful place,” the small old soldier told Dravek. “I was a fool to hire on. I was surviving begging near the church near Steep Street.”

  “How long did you train before they shipped you out?” Dravek asked.

  “Three weeks.”

  Dravek looked at Maddox.

  “Everyone receive the same training?” Maddox asked.

  “Pretty much,” the old soldier said. “Of course, the centurions and sub-centurions were all professionals from somewhere. They didn’t need the training like the rest of us.”

  Maddox was surprised the cohort had done as well as it had. Maybe others had received longer training. Maybe the old man had been one of the last recruits before the mission.

  Gricks held up a hand. The order passed to others. The cohort stopped.

  In the distance were the sounds of missile shrieks and sustained mortar fire.

  Gricks turned to the anxious cohort. “This is it, men. We’re about to earn our pay. We came to collect honey and by Shaka we’re going to get it.”

  Gricks motioned, pointing forward.

  Sub-centurions started yelling and pushing soldiers, showing them where to go.

  The two hundred quickened their pace, pushing aside creepers and hacking vines with their machetes. The way thinned and the sound of mortar fire grew. Soon, some of the men heard popping spring-rifle fire.

  The trees disappeared and the ferns and fronds were smaller, less close together. Then the foliage thinned even more, and the first elements of the cohort walked out of the jungle.

  Maddox and others saw a valley bottom below. It had lush grass and heavy buildings built on stilts. Plastic sheets surrounded the buildings.

  “Look over there,” Dravek said.

  From other parts of the jungle, which curved in a semi-circle around the slope leading to the valley bottom, appeared other Legion Culain troops. They carried spring rifles and shouted upon spying the honey depot below.

  “Ain’t that grand?” Gricks said, his eyes shining with greed. “It looks like we’re all gonna be rich. Come on, you sows. Let’s hump it down there. This is our payday.”

  Maddox glanced at Dravek.

  “Could it be this easy?” Dravek asked.

  “Did you hear what the soldier said before?” Maddox asked.

  “I suppose you mean about the Old Ones that live five hundred years ‘cause of their special honey.”

  “I do indeed,” Maddox said.

  “You don’t think such a one would let his honey go as easily as this?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “So, we stay up here near the jungle line?” Dravek asked.

  “No. That would be too risky,” Maddox said, noticing Gricks staring at them. “Keep your eyes open. This could get hairy fast.”

  At that point, Maddox and Dravek started down with the rest of the cohort.

  -34-

  As Maddox headed down the grassy slope—the thick grass almost reaching his knees—he heard an intense droning sound.

  Maddox looked up, around and behind them. He spied an aerial mass speeding over the jungle. Hordes of small creatures, the size of twenty-pound dogs, with glossy wings—they were bees, their wings blurring. They were much fatter, larger and hairier than bumblebees.

  Bees, big old bees gathered over the jungle edge behind the cohort. The mass grew, threatening in a way but not flying at the soldiers trekking down the slope to the plastic-coated buildings.

  Did the bees belong to the honey depot below? Did they have hives near here? How would these bees protect their hive or depot?

  “Are the bees going to attack us?” Maddox asked the small old soldier.

  The old man shrugged.

  “Centurion Gricks,” Maddox said, hurrying toward him. “Will the bees attack us?”

  “Are you afraid of them?” said Gricks.

  “I want to know the score.”

  Gricks looked back at the mass of bees hovering over there. The drone was constant. “Keep marching. If we reach the honey depot, the bees won’t mess with us.”

  Maddox dropped back beside Dravek. The cohort continued down the slope, all the soldiers armed and eager. All around the semi-circle slope, the rest of the legion did likewise. Was it Maddox’s imagination? Did the soldiers march with less resolution than before? The threatening bees had a way of doing that.

  A shout went up.

  Maddox focused on what was happening below.

  Down there men in camouflage gear scrambled out of the seeming ground. They were like Apaches from the Old West. The men had used grass-like tarps to hide them in hidden holes. The men rose from their concealment in teams of three. Each team set up a heavy machine gun with tripod mount and belts of ammunition.

  There had to be over a hundred crew-serviced weapons. The heavy machine guns fired without further preamble. There were no shouts or blown whistles. The first machine guns started firing and the rest of the teams followed suit. The machine guns used tracer rounds. The tracers—fiery ammunition one could visibly trace through eyesight—allowed the machine-gunners to see where their shots went. The fire climbed the slopes with their rounds and hammered into the approaching legionnaires.

  Many soldiers from Legion Culain used their bolt-action spring rifles to fire back. Maddox wasn’t one of those. For one thing, the heavy machine guns had much greater and more accurate range than the spring rifles. The tracer rounds tore into the legion, killing hundreds outright and causing the rest to drop down and snipe back from the high grass.

  Maddox had dropped early, with Dravek beside him. They didn’t crawl through the high grass toward the heavy machine-gunners, but back to the jungle. The legion wasn’t outnumbered but it was badly outgunned and outplayed.

  The waiting bees added to the problem.

  The uneven contest with the heavy machine guns went on for a time, the enemy gunners and loaders hardly touched. In return, they cut legion numbers in half, and growing.

  Maddox raised his head, got up in a bent crouch and dashed to the nearest fern, the beginning of the jungle line. Dravek and—Centurion Gricks ran after him.

  “This is already a slaughter and only going to get worse,” Gricks said as he panted behind the fern trunk with Maddox.

  “That’s obvious now.”

  A few other hardened survivors dashed to the frond-fern jungle line.

  Then the bees started coming down. They didn’t strike at those entering the jungle but swarmed upon the remaining soldiers firing at the heavy machine-guns.

  The bees were merciless. Maddox realized their ruthlessness just before he raced into the jungle. The last legionnaires dropped to the high grass with bees crawling over them. The sound of heavy machine gun fire dwindled and then ceased as Maddox and the survivors fled.

  Soon thereafter, the bees entered the jungle, flying ten meters up and searching. When it found a target, a bee would land on a man’s shoulders and thrust its hairy, stripped abdomen at him. A sharp and wet stinger appeared and stabbed the soldier in the neck. The soldier would scream and begin to thrash. Soon, he was dead. The bee, meanwhile, pulled its stinger out as a wasp would on Earth. It wouldn’t tear its abdomen doing this but buzzed up and started hunting for another man to slay.

  Spring rifles popped off. Bees buzzed angrily, dropping down to the jungle floor, some dying. Others flew faster at the soldiers fleeing through the foliage.

  Gricks wasn’t panting in terror. He did give Maddox a look of reproach as they brushed past flowery creepers. “What a screw up. We fell neatly into the Honey Men’s trap. All this talk about if we could only get through the jungle, we’d be rich. Where was the jet assistance? Where were the motorcycle flyers that were going to come in and help us? We’ve been had.”

  “Save your breath for running,” Maddox said. “The battle we lost doesn’t matter now.”

  Gricks’ eyes got huge before they narrowed as he looked at Maddox. “You’re a survivor and a killer like me.”

  The fleeing soldiers twisted past creepers and hacked at vines, moving through the dense foliage like murderous shadows. Meanwhile, the bees continued to attack and stab men in the neck.

  Maddox heard loud droning behind him. He turned. Three fat bees were almost upon him. He whirled around and fired his spring rifle, obliterating one. Dravek and Gricks took care of the other two.

  “Damn bees.” Gricks rushed forward and kicked one hard.

  It buzzed and twisted. The stinger almost pierced his leg.

  “Come on.” Maddox grabbed Gricks by the scruff of his uniform and pulled him along.

  “How dare you manhandle me?” Gricks struggled free and swung at Maddox.

  Maddox grabbed the man’s wrist, holding the arm immobile no matter how hard Gricks strained.

  “Listen to me,” Maddox said, “Get a grip on your emotions. We may have lost the fight, but you seem like the steadiest man here. I know you know we must retreat.”

  “Retreat?” Gricks asked. “Don’t you understand? We’re finished. The tribune isn’t coming back to pick us up with transport helos. We’re far from anywhere. So, what if we survive the day? We’re dead men after that.”

  “I don’t agree,” Maddox said. “Stick with me, and you’ll find that I’m right.”

  Maddox, Dravek and Gricks were alone in the depth of the jungle. Bees buzzed nearby, but they didn’t see any of the giant insects.

  The rest of the cohort was gone. Those soldiers had died by bee stings or were on their own somewhere else in the jungle.

  “We’ll use discretion,” Maddox said softly. “From now on, we move stealthily.”

  “What does it matter?” Gricks complained, doing it softly, nonetheless. “This is the Highlands, don’t you realize? These are the Southern Highlands, the South Pole region. This is the only normal territory on Gath except near the North Pole region with the spaceport.”

  “I get that,” Maddox said.

  “No, I don’t think you do. It took the legion a half month to cross the continent in the dirigibles. Then it took us a week to maneuver into position and unleash the helos. This was a grand enterprise. More legions were supposed to attack with us. I think Tribune Culain got greedy and launched our attack too soon. But that doesn’t matter because it’s over for us. If the Honey Men catch us, they’ll likely turn us into field workers for the rest of our short lives. I’m going to go down fighting instead of that.”