The Bug Wars

CHAPTER ONE

I became awake. Reflexively, with the return of consciousness, I looked to my weapons. I felt them there in the darkness, strapped to my body and attached to the panel close over my head. I felt them, and relaxed slightly, moving on to other levels of consciousness. I have my weapons, I am alive, I am a Tzen, I am dutybound, I am Rahm.

Having recalled I am a Tzen, it did not surprise me that I thought of my duty before even thinking of my name. It is part of the character of the Tzen to always think of the species and the Empire before thinking of themselves, particularly the Warrior caste, of which I was one. It has occasionally been suggested, privately of course, that some of the other castes, particularly the Scientists, think of the individual before they think of the species, but I do not believe this. A Tzen is a Tzen.

I flexed my talons. Yes, my body was functioning efficiently. I was ready to venture forth. There had been no sound of alarm or noises of battle, but I still was cautious as I pressed the release lever of my shelf with my tail. The door slid down a fraction of an inch and stopped as I scanned the chamber through the slit.

The chamber was dimly lit, closely approximating moonlight. The air was warm-not hot, but warm and humid, the temperature of night in the Black Swamps. We were not being awakened for relaxation and food replenishment. We were being awakened to hunt. We were preparing for combat.

Without further meditation, I slid the door the rest of the way open and started to slide from my shelf, then paused. Another Tzen was moving along the walkway I was about to step out on. I waited for him to pass before standing forth and securing my weapons.

The fact that I outranked him, in fact was his immediate superior on this mission, was irrelevant. My waiting was not even a matter of courtesy, it was logical. The walkway was too narrow for two to pass, and he was moving on it first.

We exchanged neither salutes nor nods of recognition as he passed, his tail rasping briefly on the walkway. His ten-foot bulk, large even for a Tzen, was easy to recognize in the semidarkness. He was Zur, my second-in-command for this mission. I respected him for his abilities, as he respected me for mine. I felt no desire to wish him luck or a need to give him last-minute instructions. He was a Tzen.

He, like the rest of my flight team, had performed efficiently in practice, and I had no reason to expect they would perform otherwise in actual combat. If he or any of the others seemed lax or panicky in battle, and if that shortcoming endangered me or the mission, I would kill them.

The walkway was clear now, and I moved along it to the junction between the shelf-wall and the engineward flex-well. For a moment, I was thankful for my rank. As flight team Commander, my flyer was positioned closest to the floor, which spared me climbing up the curved wall. Not that I would mind the climb, but since flyer training began, I had discovered I was mildly acrophobic. It didn't bother me once I was flying, but I disliked hanging suspended in midair.

I didn't spend a great deal of time checking over the flyer. That was the Technicians' job. I knew enough about the flyers to pilot them and effect minor repairs, but machines were the Technicians' field of expertise as weapons are mine, and anything they missed on their check would be too subtle for me to detect.

Instead, I occupied my time securing my personal weapons in the flyer, a job no Technician could do. I do not mean to imply by this that the Technicians are lacking in fighting skill. They are Tzen, and I would willingly match any Tzen of any caste on a one-for-one basis against any other intelligent being in the universe. But I am of the Warrior caste, the fighting elite of a species of fighters, and I secure my own weapons.

In truth, it was doubtful they would be necessary on this mission; still, it heartened me to have them close at hand. Like so many others, I had not yet completely acclimated myself to the new technology that had been so suddenly thrust upon us. The hand weapons were a link with the past, with our heritage, with the Black Swamps. Even the High Command did not object to the practice of carrying hand weapons on a mission. They merely limited the total weight of personal gear carried by a Warrior in his flyer. Nobody comes between a Tzen and his weapons, not even another Tzen.

Content with my inspection, I eased myself into the flyer and settled into the gel-cushion. With a sigh, the flyer sealed itself. I waited, knowing that as my flyer sealed, a ready light had appeared on the pilot's board; and that as soon as all the lights from this chamber were lit, we would be ready to proceed with the mission.

Unlike the colony ships, transports such as the one we were currently chambered in were stark and bare in their interiors, devoid of anything not absolutely vital to the mission. This left me with little to meditate on as I waited. Almost against my wishes, my thoughts turned toward the mission we were about to embark upon. My reluctance to think about the mission did not spring from a reluctance to fight or a fear for my personal safety. I am a Tzen. However, I personally find the concept of genocide distasteful.

Finally the flex-walls, both the one my flyer was affixed to and the one across the chamber, trembled and began to move. The mission was about to begin. Slowly they straightened, changing the parabola-cross-sectioned shape of the room into a high, narrow rectangle. The flyers on my wall were now neatly interspaced with those on the far wall. The net result was to stack us like bombs in a rack, poised and ready to drop.

As our flight team made their final preparations, we knew that the chambers on either side of us would be spreading their walls, taking advantage of the space vacated by our walls to ease the loading of its flyers. As I have said, there is no wasted space on a transport.

The floor of the chamber opened beneath me. As the bottom flyer in the stack, I had an unobstructed view of the depths below. I experienced a moment of vertigo as I looked down at the patch of darkness. We are not an aerial species.

Then I was in a free-fall. There was no jerk of release; I was just suddenly falling. Although I normally avoid stating opinions as fact, this is not a pleasant sensation.

As we had been warned during our briefings, the Battle Plan called for a night attack. This was tactically sound, since the Enemy are day-hunters, while we Tzen are accustomed to working at night. It gave us an immeasurable advantage in the impending fight. It also meant that the planet-face we were plummeting toward was dark, giving no clue of terrain features.

Crosswinds buffeted my flyer as I fell, but I was not concerned. Crosswinds, like atmospheric pressures and weather conditions, would have been taken into consideration by the pilot when he'd dropped us. In their own way, the pilots were specialists as highly trained as the Warriors.

The tingle in the footplate told me my flyer was in the outer fringe of one of the power sources dropped by scout ships. Still I fell. Now I could make out a few features of the terrain below. Far off to my left was a large body of water, below was some type of mountain range, while off to my right stretched an immense forest. Obviously it was a highly inhabitable planet. No wonder the Enemy had picked it as one of the spots to settle in. No wonder we had to take it away from them.

The tingle in the footplate was noticeably stronger now, but I continued to fall. I allowed myself to ponder the possibility of an auto-pilot malfunction, but dismissed the thought. The programs were so simple as to be essentially infallible, and thus far, I did not have sufficient cause to assume malfunction.

As if to confirm my conclusions, the auto-pilot chose that instant to react to the ground rushing towards us from below. With a soft pop, the mighty flexi-steel bat wings that had been folded against the flyer's sides unfurled, catching the rushing air and slamming the craft from a dive into a soaring glide. The sudden declaration forced me deep into the gel-cushion and narrowed my eyes.

A jab of pressure with both my heels on the footplate took the flyer out of auto-pilot and gave me full control. I allowed the flyer to glide forward for a few moments, then arrested its progress, hovering it in place with subtle play on the footplate. It was a moderately delicate process, but we had been trained by long hours of practice to be able to accomplish this almost without thinking, as we had trained in all facets of handling the flyers. The flyers were to be an extension of our bodies, requiring no more thought for operation than the operation of our legs. It was an advanced form of transport, nothing more. Our minds were to be focused on the mission, on the Enemy.

As I waited, I surveyed the immediate terrain, using both my normal vision and the flyer's sonic sensor screens. I was not overly fond of the latter, but their use was essential when operating a flyer. There would be times, particularly flying in the dark, when we would be traveling at speeds requiring warning of approaching obstacles well in advance of the range at which our normal night vision was effective.

I was hovering over a river valley, the rising thermals making the job of hovering an easy one. Ahead and to the right was the beginning of the vast forest range I had noted from the air. Obviously the pilot had been accurate in his drop calculations.

"Ready, Rahm."

It was Zur's voice telepathed into my mind. I did not look back. I didn't need to. His signal told me all I needed to know, that the team was in position behind me, each flyer in place in our tetrahedron formation, hovering and impatient to begin.

I telepathed my order to the formation.

"Power on one...Ready...Three...Two...One!"

As I sent the final signal, I trod down solidly on the footplate and felt the surge of power as the engine cut in. There was no roar, not even a whisper of sound. This was one of the advantageous features of this new propulsion system. The sparkling engines were noiseless, giving deadly support to our favored surprise attack tactics. The race that had developed the engine were fond of using it for noiseless factories and elevators. As a Warrior race, we had other uses for it.

Our formation darted forward through the dark on the first assault of the new war.