“And then hit them in the rear.”
“Under no circumstances are they to hit them in the rear. Not until they hear three shrills of my whistle. Again, just the way we drilled it.”
“So what are they to do? Follow the kzinti and watch the fun?”
“Yes, from a safe range. Beyond detection.”
Mads shook his head. “And you think that’s going to work? That the kzinti won’t have rear-area security units watching for that kind of trick?”
Smith’s smile widened. “That’s exactly what I think, Mads. Now: you have your orders. And remind our people: final fall-back is to the bunker.”
“It isn’t big enough for all of us,” Hilda said in a hushed voice. “You must be expecting a lot of casualties.”
Smith kept smiling. “Are the civvies already there?”
“Sent at the first sign of the new attack. They’re already inside the walls.”
“Good. Send them into the underground shelter.”
“And then what?”
“And then the civvie group leaders we’ve trained will help Papa ’Runner take it from there. Now scoot.”
A sergeant, whose name Freay’ysh-Administrator suddenly could not remember, bounded to his side. “Success again, Freay’ysh-Administrator. We have driven the humans back from another line of defenses.”
“Yes, yes, but how many have we killed?” Freay’ysh-Administrator gnashed his fangs at the mere thought of seeing ruined, gutted, dismembered human bodies. In a brief moment of calm between the quick, pounding waves of fury and bloodlust, he knew that this was bad command image, that the sergeant might believe his commander was verging over into the Unknowing Rage.
But evidently the sergeant did not notice, or did not care-possibly because his own exposed teeth, stooped posture, and intense pheromonal secretions indicated that he was even closer to the mind-blanking fury that his commander was narrowly holding in check. “Not as many dead leaf-eaters as we would wish, Freay’ysh-Administrator, but that is only because they are running like terrified, self-soiling sthondats.”
Freay’ysh-Administrator let his pelt ripple wildly and his lips roiled away from his teeth. “Let them run. Because there is no way for them to get past us, and this valley is a dead end. For them, a truly dead end. We must wait a little while longer, but-the slaughter at the climax! The slaughter!”
He imagined himself coated in human blood, mounting endless throngs of kzinretti: his own, Chuut-Riit’s, every kzinrett he had ever seen or smelled. The rut-aggression surged; he would kill the females which did not please him, which did not writhe against him with enough desperate fear and eagerness-
Apparently overcome by the flood of both his own and his superior’s pheromones, the sergeant tilted back his head and unleashed a screech that was both mating cry and war howl.
They both stopped, panting, and looked at each other. Freay’ysh-Administrator wondered if his noncommissioned officer was as deep in rut, as rigidly and uncomfortably tumescent, as he himself was. He blinked; the sergeant looked away.
“Orders, Freay’ysh-Administrator?”
With a profound effort, Freay’ysh-Administrator kept his voice low and leveclass="underline" “All units to the line and advance. We shall push the humans as hard as we can. We will overrun them before the sun sets. We will taste their marrow tonight, Hero; this I swear.”
“I bear your words to your Heroes, Freay’ysh-Administrator.” And the sergeant bounded off into the underbrush, moving awkwardly, stiffly.
Hilda serpentined her way through the final set of tripwires and saw Smith standing at the entry to the pillbox like he was directing traffic. His voice was loud, clear, unhurried: “That’s the last of the civvies, Papa. Get the team leaders moving. Yes, now. Everything’s going to be okay, but only if they start moving now.” To the slightly battered, but still intact squads that had already fallen back to the pillbox, he pointed them up the slopes to the defilade positions. “Morena, Keibel, take your squads up to the left flank overlooks. Varsic, Mbele, head up to the right. Missiles ready; if they have any vehicles to commit, they’re going to do it here where they’ve got a clear field of fire and comparatively safe flanks.” He looked around to see if anyone else was waiting for orders, saw Hilda, walked over. “Hi,” he said.
“Hi. They’ll be here soon. Not more than ten minutes, possibly as little as five.”
“How many losses did we take?”
“Once they started coming on strong, we couldn’t keep our heavy weapons positions secure or our lines dressed. We lost about two dozen in the last hour, and the last line will be coming under fire any minute.”
A set of rapid explosions told them that even that estimate had been optimistic. Somewhere overhead, there was a rapid, shuddering rush that echoed strangely in the saturated air of the valley: loud but muted, like listening to a sound system with all the treble removed. Explosions-large ones, starting five hundred meters behind the pillbox-pounded their way further east.
“That’s not good,” Hilda observed.
“Yeah, but that’s probably as close as their air units are going to come for now,” Smith speculated. “They know that the detection and tracking systems on the missiles we captured can’t see up through the clouds here, but that we can prang them if they drop down beneath the murk.”
And murk was not an exaggeration: the pillbox, built and dug out of an upthrust bulge of rock, was flanked by perpetually bubbling hot springs. A constant upward drift of water vapor created a ceiling haze that was nearly opaque at fifty meters altitude, and largely trapped in place by the prevailing temperature gradients about three hundred meters above that. Real fleet sensors-downlook densitometers and the like-could have picked out the basic terrain features well enough to generate targeting solutions, but to the rear-echelon, battalion-level gear that the kzinti had been using in the Susser Tal, the murk was functionally impenetrable.
“Do you think they’ll eventually bring their attack craft down into the valley?”
Smith nodded. “When they see the last of us run into the pillbox and shut the door, they’ll want to bring down the fire. I would.”
Hilda looked up the gentle upward slopes to north and south; both highlands pinched somewhat tighter here, putting the pillbox astride the valley’s narrowest bottleneck. “And the ’Runner marksmen that you’ve sent up to the defilade slit-trenches; how are they going to get inside in time?”
“They’re not.”
“What? They’ll be slaughtered out here.”
“No, they won’t, because they’re going to stay in hiding. Until they get their signal to fire.”
“But when the kzinti fan out and check their flanks, they’ll find them.”
“Tell me, Hilda, how well have the kzinti been following their standard tactical doctrines today?”
“Well, they-” She looked at him, wondering. “In a word, they weren’t following any doctrine at all. They were coming straight at us.”
Smith nodded. “So trust me for just a little longer; I’m pretty sure our troops up on the slopes are going to be fine.”
Deep within the tree line, a ripple of heavy reports-’Runner elephant guns-was drowned out by several stuttering roars and a supercharged whine-hiss: kzin automatic weapons and a heavy beamer, respectively.
Hilda swallowed. “They’re coming. And our troops won’t get here much sooner than they do.”
Smith touched her cheek with a grimy, sulfur-reeking hand. “I know. So, get inside the pillbox.”
“What? I’m an officer; I’ve got to stay out here and help-”
“It’s because you’re an officer that you’re needed inside the pillbox; it’s the most crucial position.”
“Why?”