Orphan's Triumph

SEVENTY-FIVE

THREE MINUTES LATER, the Scorpion came to rest, listing to the right, its hot skin crackling. Crashing a gravity-shielded ship isn’t physically traumatic; it’s like watching a crash holo from an armchair. But this crash killed the auxiliary systems. The Scorpion’s canopy was as opaque to our surroundings as a coffin lid.

I sighed to Jeeb, “The eagle has landed.” I shrugged back into my armor, drew Ord’s pistol, then triggered the manual canopy release.

Outside, the sky was blue. According to my helmet displays the air was chilly Earth-normal, but too oxygen-poor to breathe for more than two minutes. The Scorpion rested on endless tissue that looked just like the Ganglion blob Howard Hibble and I had captured on Weichsel, about a million years ago. Surrounding us a thousand yards away stood a solid wall of Slugs, without Warrior armor. But some carried mag rifles.

Of course. The Scorpion’s Cavorite impeller kept the Slug Warriors back the way a campfire discouraged wolves. But we sat on the One Big Slug like an unimaginably small flea biting an unimaginably big dog.

I glanced at my helmet display. Distributing a cluster bomb across an entire planet took time. Detonation of the bomblets was hours away.

To my front, a dozen Slugs inched forward. If they came too close, the Cavorite in the impeller would kill them, but Slug Warriors didn’t care. I raised Ord’s pistol, fired, and dropped the lead Slug like a punctured water balloon.

I fingered the two clips in the ammunition pouch on Ord’s holster as the Slugs drew closer. Give or take, at one round per Slug, I was short a minimum of fifty thousand rounds.

Twenty minutes later, kamikaze maggots swarmed the Scorpion, Jeeb, and me three deep while I pounded on them with Ord’s empty pistol.

Nobody really knew what happened to GIs who had been overrun by Slugs over the course of the war. But these didn’t shoot me with their mag rifles, nor stab me with the blades on their rifles’ edges, though they could have.

When poisoned Warriors fell away, others replaced them, until they had dragged me, with Jeeb on my shoulder, squealing and flailing his locomotors at them, out onto their big daddy’s skin. When they were far enough away from the Scorpion that the new Warrior crop could surround me without poisoning themselves, they drew back fifty yards, then just sat there.

Jeeb sat alongside me. My helmet timer ticked down, too slowly. Eleven hours before the bomblets went off. I smiled a little. The bomblets strewn across this planet would kill the Pseudocephalopod. The Slugs couldn’t stop that onrushing train, even if they knew they were stuck on the tracks.

My smile faded. With my ship wrecked, and on the wrong side of a black hole anyway, I would be marooned here on my enemy’s corpse, with Jeeb, my ’Bot Friday, until I starved. But I still wanted to be the last species standing.

“Brrrruuummm!” The rumble knocked me over, and I bounced on the Pseudocephalopod like a kid on a mattress.

“Brrruuu. Mmmm. Uuuummm.”

I stared down alongside me. The vibration was real enough. But the noise was coming from Jeeb’s audio output. A TOT, a Tactical Observation Transport, was designed as a battlefield snoop. In one turkey-sized package, it incorporated sensors not just to see the enemy from above or from ground level, but to hear the enemy. It eavesdropped on communications, decrypted ciphers, translated foreign languages, even ones it didn’t know, then spat out what it processed, like a spaniel retrieving an old print newspaper for its master.

In forty years, no TOT had ever intercepted Slug-to-Slug communication, though Howard’s Spooks had tried.

So the Pseudocephalopod wasn’t talking to its minions that held us at mag-rifle point. It wasn’t talking to itself.

It was talking to me.