So why did I rationalize against squeezing my trigger one more time?
I couldn’t deny that war calloused a soldier to brutality. But as I grew older, I cherished the moments when I could choose not to kill.
I lowered my rifle. “Let’s see what happens.”
By midmorning, events mooted my dilemma. The wolves isolated a lame cow from the mammoth herd, brought her down two hundred yards from us, and began tearing meat from her woolly flanks like bleeding rugs. The mammoth herd stood off, alternately trumpeting in protest at the gore-smeared wolves, then bulldozing snow with their sinuous tusks to get at matted grass beneath. For both species, violence was another day at the office.
Howard and I withdrew inside the cave, to obscure our visual and infrared signatures, and sat opposite our prisoner.
The Ganglion just floated there, animated only by the vibrations of its motility plate. After thirty years of war, all I knew about the blob was that it was my enemy. I had no reason to think it knew me any differently. For humans and Slugs, like the mammoths and wolves, violence had become another day at the office.
Howard, this blob, and I were on the cusp of changing that. If I could get us off Weichsel alive. At the moment, getting out alive required me to freeze my butt off in a hole, contemplating upcoming misery and terror. After a lifetime in the infantry, I was used to that.
Zzee.
The sound came from somewhere behind the cave, and the mag rifle round struck a bull mammoth’s flank. The herd stampeded away, to our front, and after a hundred yards, another volley of Slug rifle fire dropped a half dozen of them.
Slugs behind us. Slugs in front of us. It was coincidence. More likely, it was that they had picked up the signature of Howard’s rifle shots.
I unsnapped my ammunition pouches, because when the maggots come, they come faster than a casual reload can bring them down.
Howard did the same, shaking his head and muttering under his breath, “Oboy.”
SEVENTEEN
TWENTY MINUTES LATER, the first movement of Slugs showed in my optics, around the distant mammoth carcasses. I couldn’t see the Slugs, but I saw curving, uplifted lines carving the snow like shark-fin wakes as the maggots tunneled closer.
The little bastards never tired of coming up with surprises for us.
“Bullfrog, this is Scorpion leader. Over.” My heart skipped. The voice in my earpiece was faint but welcome. I glanced at Howard, and he nodded as he tapped his own earpiece.
I said into my helmet mike, “This is Bullfrog, Scorpion leader. You got a fix on our transponders? Over.”
“No fix, Bullfrog. We’ve just been cruising and broadcasting. Can you say your position? Over.”
Howard popped his visor and spoke to me. “Between the cave and the storm’s atmospherics, they can’t find us.”
“I cannot provide my position, Scorpion leader. But can you see the Slugs to our front and rear? There must be thousands. Over.”
“No visible Slugs, Bullfrog.” Of course not. The pilots were looking for traditional Slug massed Warriors, in black armor. But the maggots were burrowing beneath the snow.
Zzee. Zzee. The second round cracked rock off the cave lip and shot it across the cave.
“Look harder! They’re in our laps.”
“Bullfrog, we can’t see jack squat from up here. Our combat floor is now fifteen thousand. Except for pickup. We can’t pick up what we can’t find.”
I swore into the mike. “How many did you lose to the heavys yesterday?”
“Six, Bullfrog. We gotta stay high or we won’t do you or us any good at all.”
Zoomies never changed. Late in the last century, before the Second Afghan, even before the First Afghan, the old Soviet empire’s gunships had been chased back to altitudes that rendered them ineffective against ground targets by a few well-placed shoulder-fired missiles. Not that I blamed the Zoomies. Scorpions and their pilots were in short supply, especially to the pilots’ loved ones.
I crawled to the cave mouth, raised my finger cam, and peeked. The burrows converging on us numbered in the hundreds, and the closest were a hundred yards away. And that was just in front of us. The noose was certainly drawing close on our flanks and rear, too.
I dug in my thigh pocket, jerked out my last smoke canister, and lobbed it out into the open. As purple smoke billowed in a widening cone, I said, “Scorpion leader, I have marked my position with smoke. Do you identify? Over.”
“I haven’t seen smoke since flight school, Bullfrog. Where the hell… Okay. I identify purple smoke. Over.”
“I confirm. Purple smoke. Target is troops in the open. Under a foot of snow. What are you packing?”
The closest burrows were fifty yards away now.
“Antipersonnel CBUs. Where you want ’em? Over.”
“Drop on smoke. I say again, drop on smoke.”
“Bullfrog? I confirm we are prepared to deliver CBUs on purple smoke. Please say your position relative to smoke.”
“Our position is danger close. I say again, danger close.”
The first Slug popped out of the snow, ten feet away, mag rifle at the ready. I dropped it with an aimed shot. Then another came up behind it, and Howard peppered it with a three-round burst. There were a hundred more burrows just behind the first two. We couldn’t play whack-a-mole very long. We had overhead cover and Eternads. Our prisoner, however, wore no armor.
Nobody is quick to fire on his own troops, even if his own troops tell him to.
I said, “We’re being overrun! Bring the rain, Scorpion leader.”
“Roger. Keep your head down, Bullfrog.”
Howard and I scuttled as far back into our shallow cave as possible, then flipped our prisoner up on edge, belly out. The Ganglion’s Slug metal motility plate shielded all three of us as we waited three heartbeats.
Scorpion leader’s voice crackled in my earpiece. “On the way. God, I hope you’re in a deep hole, Bullfrog.”
If you believe, as certain outworld cultures do, that the ancestral human race of Earth is the spawn of Satan himself, the invention and widespread deployment over the last century of the cluster bomb unit may be the proof.
CBUs are cylindrical big bombs that split open to release a spray of a half-ton or more of little bombs, each of which explodes and spews hundreds of individual darts or fragments. If the bomber is particularly sociopathic, nerve gas capsules, radioactive pellets, incendiary pills, or germs can be substituted.
The worst of it, at least when used on humans, is that ten percent of the bomblets soft-land and don’t detonate. They fester for years, as gratuitous land mines. To aid ordnance recovery personnel, the bomblet balls are painted bright colors. Worst of all, this color also attracts children.
However, at the moment, the morality of CBUs concerned me less than their considerable efficacy at blowing the crap out of maggots.
I curled my finger cam around the edge of our motility plate shield. A half-dozen Slug Warriors swayed, backlit by the dawn, in the cave mouth, like fat black cobras.
Inside my helmet, I muttered, “Come on. Come on!”
One warrior trained its rifle on the motility plate as twenty more darkened the cave mouth.
Ccrraacck.
The rock vibrated beneath my boot soles.
A one-ton CBU weighs the same as a one-ton bunker buster, but a CBU’s concussion doesn’t lift, then drop you, like a thud does.
The slugs in the cave mouth just went to pieces, chunks of armor and tissue splattering and ricocheting off the rock behind us, as well as off the Slug metal plate in front of us.
I pulled back my finger cam and shut my eyes.
Ccrraacck. Ccrraacck. Ccrraacck.
The smell of cordite leaked through my ventilator and filled my helmet.
The cave floor stopped vibrating. I counted to twenty, then peeked my finger cam out again.