Firemask: Book Two of the Last Legion Series (31 page)

CHAPTER
26

Unknown System/Unknown World

“Poor bastards,” Monique Lir said, watching the two columns of Musth warriors trudge toward them from Keffa’s ship. “They outnumber us what, two to one?”

“At least,” Njangu said. “Duck your heady-bone. Here comes their air.”

Two aircraft soared out of a lock about halfway up the ship’s hill. They were small flits that could carry no more than four warriors.

“Guess they went and forgot their
aksai,
” Monique said. “Shall I have a team Shrike ‘em, boss?”

“What’s the chance of their pooh-bah, this Keffa, being on one of them?”

“Eh,” Lir guessed, waggling her fingers, “six to five, either way.”

“Then we’ll let ‘em stumble on in ignorance for a while. ‘Sides, Garvin gets the next moment of glory. But let’s slide out of the line of fire, on the off chance those lifters have got heat detectors and somebody who knows how to use them.”

The two trotted down the rise, to the clump of trees, strange bleached-green growths more like fungi than real woods.

About twenty-five ‘Raum and a scattering of I&R soldiers waited. Njangu noted Jasith, looking lost and a little scared, Poynton talking to her in low, soothing tones. He also noted that Jasith was firmly clutching a small pistol, a hideout gun one of the ‘Raum had given her.

At least she wasn’t being a rich idiot and vaporing around.

On the reverse slope, the enemy marched closer. A dozen men and women came up from hiding, spattered bursts across the right column, ducked away.

Garvin and another ten came from a nest of low boulders that didn’t look like they could hide anything, fired in turn while the first set fled up the hillside in the cover of a ravine and over the hill to safety.

The Musth were firing back, but there wasn’t anything to shoot at.

One of the flits swooped low, hovered.

Finf
Heckmyer put half a belt through an SSW, and the lifter shuddered, slid sideways, and, trailing smoke, limped back to the command ship.

Garvin, just at the top of the hill, nodded in satisfaction. “ ‘At’s right, boys. Learn how it works the hard way.”

• • •

The humans moved in twenty-man groups, keeping in touch by com, occasionally joining up for attacks against the Musth, but moving, always moving.

The weather was mild, with no more than occasional sheeting rain.

“Something’s real wrong here,” a troopie observed. “Nobody ever goes sojering in good weather. Where’s the ice? Where’s the snow? Where’s the frigging typhoons?”

• • •

A column of warriors patrolled carefully through a long patch of trees. A blast tore the middle of the column apart, and warriors savagely opened up, spraying everything and nothing.

Finally realizing no return fire was coming, they sheepishly stopped shooting, and aid-givers and officers ran toward the wounded.

Then the second booby trap went off, less than five meters from the first, decimating the command group and medics.

Ten ‘Raum stood, pumped five rounds each into the swarm, ran. One wasn’t quick enough and was shot down.

• • •

The Musth
were
learning. An I&R team stalked a fifty-warrior sweep, and was skillfully led into an ambush, with no human survivors.

Garvin, after surveying the body-laden field, ordered his subordinates to sermonize on what happens when you let yourself think your enemy’s stupider than you.

• • •

None of the human groups spent more than a few hours in one place, one eye on the sky, the other on a possible ambush site. They endlessly circled Keffa’s ship, closing for a fast attack on the warriors tracking them, then vanishing into the wilds.

Little by little, the soldiers were memorizing their fighting ground.

But so were the Musth.

• • •

Keffa felt utter frustration. He had a ship that could nearly blow a planet out of its orbit, but he didn’t have sensors delicate enough to detect one sniper hiding on the hillside.

He could remain airborne, but how could he hunt his prey?

He refused to consider admitting withdrawal, returning with a larger, more suitable force.

A Musth never retreated, after all.

• • •

“Try this,” Alikhan suggested.

Dill looked skeptically at the bit of orange growth, but put it in his mouth, chewed tentatively.

“Sort of like, oh, a real dead potato,” he said. “But it’s staying down.” He wrote a description in a notebook.

“Now this.”

“This” was quite appealing — green with white striations. Dill chewed twice, then his eyes bulged and he stumbled to the nearest bush and vomited. He rinsed his mouth from his canteen, came back.

“This one’s next,” Alikhan said mercilessly.

“Gimme a minute.”

He drank more water, felt his nausea subside.

“Thus far,” Alikhan said, “we have seven plants we both can eat, four neither of us can stomach, and eleven you can’t tolerate.”

“What fun I’m having in the name of science,” Dill said.

“Well, since we are not infantrymen, we must serve in some way.”

“And what good little crunchies we be. But nobody’s ever gonna give anybody a medal for puking above and beyond the call of duty.”

Dill scratched his burgeoning beard, which he thought made him look distinguished, but most others thought looked like a wire brush that had lost an engagement with a wildcat.

“So,” he said, “you being a canny analyst, how’s all this nonsense gonna play out?”

“Either Keffa will call for reinforcements and destroy us; Keffa will give up and abandon us; Senza will have gotten my message, and decided it’s in his interest to help us; or we shall destroy Keffa. In descending order of probability.

“I can live with those odds.”

“Yet another, more likely than the others, is that Keffa will destroy us without assistance.”

“Wonderful. The dice are loaded, as usual. The best option is being marooned.
Best?
What did I just say? I wish I could claim bein’ stuporous.” Dill changed the subject. “I wonder why we haven’t seen any critters bigger than my head yet? Especially ones that’ll fit on a grill over a nice fire.”

“Perhaps there are none. I am not an ecologist.”

“I surely miss a steak that isn’t prefabbed and dehydrated,” Dill mourned.

• • •

That night, a sentry saw movement, woke his sleeping team up. He pulled a grenade, and something twice the size of a Musth, with, as the sentry said, “more legs than God,” made a purring sort of noise, then leapt away.

“Perhaps,” Alikhan suggested, “someone else is as interested in steak as you, without worrying about the niceties such as a fire.”

“Shaddup,” Ben Dill said.

• • •

Thirty raiders were surprised, pincered between two columns. They shot their way out, but still lost ten.

“I’m sorry, Garvin,” Jasith apologized. “I just haven’t felt like it.”

“Who has? Terror doesn’t make me real lustful, either.”

“Do you think we’ll make it?”

Garvin hesitated, then said, “Of course.”

“You’re kind of a crappy liar.”

“I guess it’s the military life. I
used
to be a great shill.”

Jasith looked across the pond their element was camped by, at the vegetation outlined by the setting sun.

“I don’t think I could ever get used to a world where the colors aren’t what they’re supposed to be.”

“Sure you could,” Garvin said. “After a couple three you figure out nobody knows what supposed to be really is.”

Silence for a time, then Jasith said, “I wonder what Loy’s doing now?”

Hopefully,
Garvin thought,
being hung by his nonexistent balls by the Musth for associating with a known bandit, but more likely making sure Mellusin Mining is now part of his holdings.
But he said nothing.

• • •

“I get horny when I’m scared,” Njangu breathed into Poynton’s ear. They were curled together some meters from the rest of their group.

“Again? No wonder you were a criminal.”

For some reason he couldn’t figure out, Njangu hadn’t been bothered telling Jo Poynton about his normally hidden past as a junior thug on Waughtal’s Planet, nor even about his abused childhood. Perhaps it was because of Jo’s honesty about her own less-than-stellar past.

“Of course again,” he purred.

Two scouts were following a Musth column when a missile came in from nowhere and killed them in mid-transmission. A reaction team found the site, quickly reported, then ran fifty meters and went to cover, as Dr. Froude had asked them to. Another rocket exploded where they’d been.

“I’ve been expecting this,” Froude told Garvin. “We’ve been too fast, too loose on the com, and they’ve finally been able to track our signals.

“We’ll have to change policy, and go to limited casts, changing frequencies regularly. Also, move after transmitting if you want to live. If that doesn’t work, we’ll have to start using messengers. Or perhaps semaphore flags.”

The noose was tightening.

• • •

“What’re we like, Monique?”

“Food enough for, oh, thirty days, more if we can really cut the rats with local edibles. About two units, maybe a little more, per man.”

A unit of fire was a soldier’s basic ammunition need for one battle — 150 rounds for a basic blaster, 500 for a Squad Support Weapon, two Shrikes per team, and so forth.

“Not good,” Garvin glummed.

“Not good at all,” Lir agreed.

The Musth had, the two scientists figured, a total of five flits on board their ship. Careful observation by a Shrike team produced an interesting fact — when the flits were taking off and landing in the hangar lock, the team’s antiradar detectors went dead. The ship was shutting down its sensors when they landed or launched aircraft. Evidently the Musth didn’t have much faith in their ship’s friend-or-foe recognition abilities.

The Shrike team crept to within range and waited until nightfall. The flits buzzed around the command ship, and the hangar dock slid open.

The team fired, and the Shrike slammed into the lock, exploded.

The blast rocked the great ship, and smoke boiled out. Then, nothing more. The waiting flits were boarded through a secondary lock, and this time the Musth’s tracking radar stayed up.

Sometime during the night, repair crews put a big, ugly patch over the blackened hole in the skin, and the fight went on.

• • •

A day later, with no warning, the command ship launched a dozen long-range missiles in all directions. They exploded against trees, boulders, empty ground.

None of the teams watching the ship was hit.

“System failure? Panic? They thought they saw something? I don’t have the froggiest,” Froude said.

“Insufficient data to theorize,” Heiser said, sounding a bit more professional.

Contamination from the hyperdrive missiles pocked the land around the ship, and Garvin wondered if Keffa was intending to create a radioactive moat.

Two days later, the ship lifted and awkwardly grounded three kilometers away, and warriors began looking for the humans again.

The incident remained a puzzle.

• • •

Heiser and Froude disappeared for a day, came back with one of the ship-observation teams.

“Did you two ever hear of military discipline?” Garvin snarled. “Or that we might worry?”

“We went out,” Heiser explained, “without clearing it with you because we knew you wouldn’t approve.”

“Don’t punish the troops,” Froude added. “We said we were under orders, highly classified and such.”

“Not that I think you’ll be that angry,” Heiser said. “I think we’ve got a way to get rid of this Musth.

“The only drawback is it’ll probably irretrievably strand us here on this planet.”

“We were rather hoping we could find a way to seize the ship for our own purposes,” Froude said. “But, unfortunately …”

Garvin and Njangu were wondering why the scientists seem to have all the good ideas, then both turned white when Froude explained how they’d done their “research.”

“Nobody’s that loony,” Njangu said in wonderment.

“I guess they are.”

“Now,” Njangu said, “all we need is a dozen or so other loons to try it out.”

“A dozen,” Garvin said grimly, “and I&R’s two best climbers.”

“Me and Lir.”

Garvin nodded.

“And this one isn’t likely to be one of those laugh ho-ho in the face of danger vacations.”

“You’d rather hang around here,” Njangu said, “getting whittled and eating trees while we’re waiting for Keffa’s backup goons to materialize?”

• • •

Froude and Heiser’s investigation
had
been thorough. They had kept with the observation team for a couple of days, and noted that the Musth, like most soldiers, were unfortunate creatures of habit.

At dawn and dusk, the traditional times of attack, warriors took fighting positions outside the ship in hasty trenches, no more than knee-high packed dirt parapets, that snaked, like molehills, around the command ship. Then roll was taken and tasks assigned.

After the dawn assembly, the warriors moved off on their missions. At dusk, they filed back into the ship. A few minutes later, floodlights came on, and the observers’ telltales showed infrared, radar and amplified light swept the area until near dawn.

But not, evidently, around the ship’s base — some sort of creature evidently hid near one of the fins during the dusk assembly, then, once the Musth had vanished, streaked for the nearby woods. It didn’t make it, caught by the searchlights, and then a missile was wasted blowing whatever it was into oblivion.

“I’d imagine a ship built for onplanet warfare wouldn’t have such a dismaying gap in its defenses,” Froude theorized. “Which shows again you should always use the proper tool for a task. This deep-space elephant is a risk to its crew.”

Njangu considered who was really at risk from the ship, but said nothing.

After Froude and Heiser had developed their theory, the next night, as the warriors were pulling back for the night, the two scientists crawled from their cover up the entrenchments, until they were only a few meters from one of the bullet-tipped fins, and considered matters as the searchlights began sweeping the perimeter.