Orphan's Triumph

FOURTEEN

HOWARD AND I lay side by side in the snow while gusts now measuring one hundred thirty miles per hour rocketed snow above us, and the outside temperature remained two degrees below zero, Fahrenheit. The wind chill wasn’t worth checking, though my armor would have calculated it. My armor had lost its heater, not its brains.

Therefore, I heard Howard perfectly when he whispered over the intercom, “We won’t be able to shoot our way through the Pseudocephalopod lines.”

Actually, with our M40s, the two of us, like any human infantry, could shoot our way through many times our weight in Slug Warriors. But once they realized where we were, the Slugs would pour onto our trail by the thousands, blizzard or no blizzard, brain-dead or not.

Stealth was our only option. I fingered the trench knife on my belt with numb fingers. “I know. On a normal Slug perimeter, the Warriors spread out twenty yards apart. I’ll low-crawl up to the perimeter, take one out, then we’ll tow the blob through the gap and disappear into the storm before they realize they’re down a maggot.”

Howard jerked a thumb back at our prisoner, wobbling in the wind. “Even disconnected from the Ganglion, Warriors will react to the disturbance.”

“They won’t notice a disturbance. They see in the infrared spectrum. They know human soldiers give off heat, and that’s what they look for. My armor’s stone-cold. And I’ll knife the maggot, so there won’t be any firearm heat flash.”

“Then what?”

“Then we’ll find shelter. When the storm breaks, they’ll find us by our transponders.”

Through his visor, Howard frowned. “What if your plan goes wrong?”

I shrugged inside my armor. Over the decades, I had salvaged more disasters than I had caused. However, including this fiasco, my track record with plans wasn’t so great. “Then we’ll do what we always do. Run like hell until we think of something. You have a better idea?”

“If we break through the perimeter, we’ll be running through a blizzard for days. Our prisoner may not even survive. And your armor heater’s broken. We’re too old to try this, Jason.”

“If we don’t try this, we won’t get older.”

I cross-slung my rifle over my back, maxed my optics so I could see a yard in front of my face, and low-crawled through the snow.

Twenty minutes later, I paused, panting, behind a drift. My arm and leg muscles burned, my knee and elbow joints throbbed, and I sucked wind so hard that my visor’s med readout flashed amber. According to the medic who had doped me before we landed, I was supposed to feel great. We were too old for this.

The wind swirled snow away from the area fifteen yards to my front, and I glimpsed an angular black peak that rose a foot above the drifts. Hair stood on my neck. As expected, a Slug Warrior, faced away from me, was hunkered down in defense. Unlike GIs, Slug Warriors didn’t share fighting positions with another soldier. Slug Warriors were more like sophisticated white corpuscles than individual soldiers, and they needed neither companionship nor a buddy to take watch while they slept.

I closed the gap between me and the Warrior to five yards, drew my knife, then chinned my comm bar. Behind me, Howard, presuming he hadn’t fallen asleep, would see the “go” light in his visor display, feel the vibrate alarm on his cheek, and crawl forward with the Ganglion in tow.

I fingered my knife. There was no “book” on fighting mano-a-maggot. Few Earth troops had done it live, despite the Slug War’s duration. Slug body armor was easily penetrated by a bullet or a broadsword swung by a six-foot-five Casuni. But a knife wielded by a guy so old that his joints creaked when he rode an exercise bike?

Slugs’ armor ended in a skirt at ground level, because they traveled on one bare foot, though they didn’t slime along like a true snail. There was an opening higher up in the armor through which the Warrior extruded a tentacle-like pseudopod to grasp its mag-rail rifle. And the armor was open at the anterior end so the Slug’s infrared sensory patches, on what one might call its head, could “see.”

The biggest knife target would be exposed by bulldogging the Slug over, like a roped calf, then stabbing its underbelly, but that would also create the biggest commotion. The pseudopod hatch at the armor’s midriff was smaller than a saucer. The approach would have to be like cutting a sentry’s throat from behind.

The Spooks say a Slug Warrior has no independent cognition, no sense of self, because it’s simply part of a single, physically separated organism. The Slugs killed my mother, killed the great love of my life, killed more friends than I could count. So I should have been spoiling to gut this one like a trout.

Still, the knife tip trembled in my hand, neither from cold nor fear. My years had taught me how empty this universe was, and how unique life, any life, was within it. Even Slugs.

I stopped, drew a breath, and waited a heartbeat until my hand steadied. Another thing my years had taught me was not to wax philosophic during knife fights.

I paused again a yard behind the Warrior. It stood, the base of its armor buried in drifted snow, six feet long from armor crest to tapered tail, and five feet high. Its armor shone black in the storm’s dimness, the transverse plates on its back overlapping like an armadillo’s. Its pseudopod wrapped its rifle’s peculiar grip. Peculiar to a human hand, at least.

The Warrior swayed, more than the wind required, as though listening to music.

I switched the knife to my natural hand, took a deep breath, then lunged.