Twenty-Three

Early the next morning, two kilometers north of Outskirts

“Pourriez-vous faire plus de bruit?” Beauregard Rousseau turned to shoot a whispered snarl at one of the Greene twins who had just stumbled over a branch, falling to one knee with a loud grunt. “Boy, you gon’ ghost us. You need be careful, boy, ol’ Rousseau, I ain’ gon’ be ambushed by these chiens petits ‘cause a’ you, eh?”

Whichever Greene twin it was glared back at the Cajun. “Worry about your own feet, old man.”

A few meters ahead at the head of the column, Mike looked back briefly. He shook his head. The Greene twins weren’t working out well. Behind him, Yuri Pyak had abandoned his usual happy grin for a doubtful look. He turned spaniel eyes on Mike and shrugged. 

The six men were filtering silently through the woods towards the big bend in the river. They had been on the trail since an hour before sunrise. Mike and Yuri Pyak were taking turns on point, with Beauregard Rousseau and the Greenes spaced out at three-meter intervals. Thomas Quiet Water floated ahead as a scout, drifting through the woods like a puff of smoke in the breeze. Even the cynical Rousseau was impressed with the young Cheyenne’s movement skills – on one of the Indian’s sudden appearances, Mike heard the Cajun breathe, “Ce garçon, il peut bouger comme un fantôme!”

“Il est-il bon, n’est-il pas?” Mike whispered back, eliciting a surprised stare from the Cajun.

And there I thought that two years of high school French would never amount to anything, Mike told himself in a moment of wry amusement.

He planned to cover the twenty kilometers to the river bend by late afternoon, get the sensors placed before dusk, and find a good hiding spot from which to keep an eye and ear out for the Grugell. So far, things were going according to plan. They’d been overflown once, by a provisioning droid out of Settlement carrying a squat black cylinder in its robotic arms – the relay.

It was late afternoon when Mike heard the first familiar whining buzz. He held up one hand, fist clenched. The scouts stopped instantly.

Mike stood, eyes half closed, listening hard. The buzzing wasn’t getting any louder, and seemed to be moving left to right. He motioned for Rousseau to come forward.

“I reckon that’s the river just ahead,” he whispered. “You hear that?”

“Oui, je pense ainsi – I t’ink so, yeah,” Rousseau agreed.

The Greenes and Yuri Pyak gathered around. “That’s one of their flying platform things,” Mike explained. “You all saw that one I brought in from the mountains, right?”

Pyak grinned, not understanding. The others nodded agreement.

“I bet they’re running a patrol over the river.”

Thomas Quiet Water appeared suddenly, startling the group. “Two,” he whispered, slicing one palm in front of his chest like a flat object scudding along a surface.

“How far is dis’ river, eh?” Rousseau hissed.

The Cheyenne held up two fingers. “Two hundred meters?” Mike whispered. Quiet Water nodded.

The buzzing faded in the distance.

“OK, here’s what we should do,” Mike announced. “Let’s get up close to the riverbank, lay low for a while, and get a feel for how often they run the river. There should be time between patrols for us to get these little sensors placed in the big trees on this bank. Then we can back off, find a decent spot for a base camp, and figure out how we’ll keep watches.”

“Sounds good to me, mate,” the Greene twins chorused. Rousseau nodded, frowning.

Yuri Pyak, grinning as always, let out a burst of Russian, shook his head, and laboriously intoned, “Da, we watch river? Yuri watch, uh, watch, first watch?”

“OK, Yuri, you can take first watch with me.” Mike had taken a liking to the madly cheerful little Nenets hunter from the start. “Edward and Albert, you can take a watch together, and Thomas and Beauregard, will you take the third watch?” Mike had noted the Cajun’s respect for the Indian’s woodcraft. It was the only outward sign of respect he’d shown anyone. 

The second Grugell patrol came just at nightfall, a little over two hours after they’d heard the previous run. Two Grugell mounted on flying platforms buzzed straight down the middle of the river, heads turning from side to side scanning the banks but not noticing the scouts dug into a heavy patch of ferns.

“Dem boys, dey don’ see so good, eh?” Rousseau chuckled. “Here we be, Gru-gell! Ici!”

“Let’s get these sensors placed,” Mike said. 

Yuri Pyak took one sensor, Thomas Quiet Water another, and Mike the third. The sensors were to be placed a kilometer apart. After a few moments whispered conversation, Mike ran one klick upstream, Pyak placed his in a large tree on the spot, and Thomas Quiet Water went a klick downstream. The sensors were in place and the group settled into a base camp before midnight. 

Once their rough camp was established, Mike took the opportunity to call in to Settlement. To his surprise, Colonel Davies himself was on the other end of the comm linkup. 

“Well, boy, how y’all getting’ along out there?” the Colonel’s drawl tinned from the little hand-held unit.

“We’re all OK, Colonel. The sensors are in. We put them up in some big trees, all about a klick apart. We’ve seen two alien patrols; they’re running about every two hours straight down the river.”

“Good, that might mean they’re a-getting lazy. How many each trip?”

“Two, both times, each on one of those little platform things,” Mike replied. 

“Good! Ah reckon they’ll make their move before long. You boys hang in out there, son, you hear? Ah don’t expect we’ll keep you out there too much longer. Our tech boys here are workin’ on some other things. Ah’ll be back to you around sunrise.”

“OK, sir. We’ll be here.” Mike shut the communicator off and motioned to Yuri Pyak. “Let’s go get a spot where we can see the river, Yuri. We’ve got first watch.”  

Mike and Yuri passed their four hours uneventfully. One Grugell patrol buzzed down the river midway through their shift. Other than that, the river flowed peacefully, and the usual nighttime creatures chattered and buzzed in the undergrowth. 

That all changed when the Greene twins took the second shift.

Mike sat bolt upright suddenly, awakened from a fitful sleep. A shot! The thought burst into his brain. The unmistakable sounds of shouting, human voices, English accents. 

The Greenes.

Another shot sounded accompanied by more shouting, curses this time. Mike was already up and running through the pitch-dark woods, his big Parks double held at the ready. Somewhere towards the river, he heard the unmistakable crack of a Grugell energy weapon. A flash of green light illuminated the trees in front of him. Then another. 

More running footsteps sounded to his right, then a crash as the runner tripped in the darkness and fell hard. The snapped “Ces idiots, ils nous obtiendront tout détruits!” told him it was Rousseau.

Thomas Quiet Water appeared, making eye contact with Mike for moment.  “Two, on skimmers,” he shouted before disappearing into the darkness, running for the river. A green bolt crashed through the treetops over Mike’s head. 

Mike arrived at the riverbank forty meters from the lookout point where the Greenes were supposed to be. He could barely see in the faint light from the two moons that were up, but he could see enough. A Grugell flying platform was looping away towards the far bank, with one alien at the controls. If there was a second alien craft, Mike couldn’t see it.

Another shot sounded from the lookout point. The platform pivoted and swung back, unleashing a green energy bolt from a pod attached to the base of the control handle. A scream came from the bank where the bolt hit, sending showers of sparks into the air.

Mike risked a shout. “Beauregard! Tom! Yuri! Where are you?” 

“Ici!  Right ‘ere, boy!” the Cajun shouted, somewhere off to Mike’s right. Thomas appeared to Mike’s left, waving one hand at Mike from a few meters down the bank. A moment later Yuri Pyak crashed through the riverbank growth to Mike’s side. 

The Grugell flying platform had looped away again, crossing right to left in front of the scouts, its driver craning to seek out the source of the shouts. He turned in suddenly, driving at Mike’s position. A green bolt shot past, fired blindly, crashing into the trees on Mike’s left. 

“Yuri!” Mike shouted, pointing. 

Pyak didn’t need any further instruction. He leaped to the edge of the riverbank, dropping into a prone position and sighting down the barrel of his massive Krupp semi-auto. The cannon roared once, twice, belching a two-meter tongue of flame into the night. Both shots hit, the first blasting the alien driver backwards off the platform in a shower of black blood and white bone, the second impacting on the weapon pod and detonating it in a thundering flash.

“Over here!” a shout from one of the Greenes. “We’re hurt! Good God, man, we’re both hurt!”

Mike ran for the lookout point, white ghosts from the explosion dancing in his vision. The others ran with him. Across the river, a familiar whine was growing louder.

“That’s one of their big flyers,” Mike shouted, “We’ve got to get out of here!”

A dead alien lay by an upturned platform in the shallow water by the bank. One of the Greenes – Edward, it turned out – was messily and obviously dead, his chest shattered and scorched, still smoking from the energy weapon bolt that ended his life. Albert Greene was hunched a meter away, thrashing around and screeching his agony, holding one shattered leg. 

“Il ne va nulle part,” Rousseau observed unsympathetically, looking down at Edward Greene. Thomas Quiet Water knelt by Albert. 

“You can’t walk. Hold still. Look at this,” he ordered the surviving twin, and held up his left hand. When Albert Greene reflexively looked up at his hand, the Cheyenne sliced his right into the Englishman’s temple, knocking him instantly unconscious. He looked up to meet Mike and Yuri’s shocked expressions.

“Now he doesn’t hurt. Now we can carry him.”

Nobody argued as Thomas slung Albert Greene over his shoulder. “Back to the camp, get our gear,” Mike ordered.

“They gon’ be huntin’ us now, boy,” Rousseau snapped. “What we gon’ do? Courir ou se battre?”

“Hear that?” Mike snarled back, pointing across the river. “That’s one of their flying ships, probably with a bunch of troops aboard. One of those things blasted my cabin into splinters with one shot. You want to hang around and see it for yourself?” They ran for their gear.

A Grugell Scout-ship, circling over the river

“There they are,” the ship’s pilot said to his co-pilot, pointing at five red dots on the scanner display. “We’ll land on the riverbank, drop the troops, and cover them from above when they pursue.”

He stabbed one claw down on a toggle and barked into a wand microphone on the control panel in front of him.

“Prepare to disembark. Set all weapons on full power. There will be five aliens to your front as you disembark. Kill them all.”

The ship swooped like a diving hawk, disgorging ten armed troops on the riverbank. They fanned out and, as one, trotted into the trees.

The scout’s camp

Albert Greene was still unconscious, groaning slightly where Thomas Quiet Water had dropped him unceremoniously on his bedroll. The four uninjured scouts frantically grabbed gear, stuffing bedding and equipment into packs one-handed while clutching weapons on the other. 

“Quiet! Listen!” Mike hissed. The whining of the alien ships’ driver had changed, dropping and then rising again. “What are they doing?”

“On the riverbank,” Thomas whispered, “Eight, nine, ten, ten of them, coming this way.”

The whine of the ship increased, passing somewhere overhead in the dark. 

“Damn,” Rousseau hissed. “Ever’ body should be getting’ down, I t’ink we gon’ ‘ave a fight ‘ere.”

A green energy bolt slammed into a tree a foot from Yuri Pyak, showering him with splinters. He let out a yelp, diving for the ground. The other scouts followed suit. 

Another bolt flashed overhead, ripping through the ferns between Mike and Rousseau.

“We gon’ need some ‘elp, here, boy!” Rousseau shouted. “Dese t’ings maybe got low-light gear, eh? Dey can see us, but we can’ see dem!” He rose to one knee, firing his big Parks at a shape barely glimpsed through a gap in the ferns. The high-ex round hit a small tree and detonated, sending the conifer crashing harmlessly to the ground. The shot drew a volley of return fire. Rousseau yelped as a bolt grazed his shoulder.

Help, Mike thought frantically. Where are we going to get any help?

“Behind you!” Thomas Quiet Water’s imperative hiss cut into him. Mike rolled to his right as a green bolt struck the ferns where he’d been lying. Dimly he heard Thomas’ old Lazzeroni roar once in reply, drawing a thin screech from out in the woods.

“They be all ‘round us!”  Rousseau shouted.

Mike dug in his pack suddenly. A hard, square object in the bottom of his pack hit his hand; he grabbed it and pulled it out. 

It was his provisioning droid beacon. I hope they’re still turned on, he thought, pressing the stud. The tiny red light winked on, indicating the unit was transmitting. About forty klicks, it’ll take fifteen minutes or so.

Another volley of green bolts raked the ground in the midst of the group. Albert Greene sat up suddenly, screeching in pain – an energy bolt had neatly severed his left arm at the elbow.

Mike caught a glimpse of a shadowy, stick-thin figure moving between two trees. He raised his Parks and fired, bisecting the figure with a flash of flame from the 15mm high-ex round. He fired the other barrel at another half-seen form, missing that round. He dropped the Parks and drew his Colt.

A screeching whine from overhead drew his attention. The alien scout ship came in low overhead, drivers screaming. A white guide beam lanced downward, illuminating Yuri Pyak where he crouched in a fern thicket.

Yuri looked up once. The aliens were fast, but Yuri was a fraction of a second faster. He threw himself backwards, raising the Krupp cannon, sighting on the source of the white guide beam that flickered after him. He fired once, twice, three times. A shower of sparks blasted off the craft where each of the first two shots hit. The third hit the energy weapon projector just as it was about to fire, disintegrated the ship in a flash of green-white light. The thunder of the explosion flattened all of the human scouts into the ferns, the blast rippling through their insides with a sickening feeling. Shards and chunks of metal pattered on the ground all around.

An eerie silence followed. Mike crawled to where Beauregard Rousseau lay staring into the darkness. “You OK?” he whispered.

“I s’pose I gon’ live, boy, but dis shoulder be burnt pretty good.”

“Can you shoot?”

“’Ell, yes!”

Mike grinned in the darkness. “You’ll do, Beauregard, you’ll do.” The Cajun merely snorted in reply as Mike low-crawled off towards the little Siberian’s hiding place.

Mike found the Nenets tribesman calmly stuffing five-inch-long shells into the massive Krupp cannon he wielded so deftly. “Yuri, now I see how you can hunt loggers with that big thing!” he whispered.

Yuri smiled as broadly as a child at a birthday party, and replied, “Logger, da! BOOM!” Chuckling to himself, he tucked the last cannon shell into his weapon, worked the enormous bolt to chamber a round, and rolled over to a good prone firing position.

Thomas Quiet Water was crouched next to Albert Greene, who was moaning in agony.

“He needs a doctor,” Mike observed. Thomas nodded. He was staring fixedly off into the trees. “What is it?” Mike asked. Thomas held up two fingers, and then pointed straight ahead into the trees.

“Stay here,” the Cheyenne whispered. He drew a half-meter long, razor-edged knife from his boot and faded silently into the pitch-black forest.

Mike knelt next to Albert Greene. A faint smell of burnt meat rose from the severed arm, making Mike’s stomach lurch. The Englishman’s eyes rolled open once, passing over Mike without recognition before closing again as he fell off into a faint.

At least he’s not bleeding too much.

The thought was interrupted by a thin, reedy squawk from the trees. A green bolt shot twenty or thirty meters out, lancing left-to-right, striking a tree. 

Silence.

A faint sound of footsteps drifted slowly closer. Mike slowly crept backwards into a patch of high ferns.

Somewhere, out in the night, a twig cracked.

“Dat won’ be dat Injun boy,” the hiss from behind him almost made Mike jump out of his boots. “Dat boy move like Une bouffée de fumée.” Rousseau raised himself just enough to see over Mike’s shoulder. “Dey be les monsters comin’ in, I t’ink.” Mike nodded.

A faint shape took form, sticklike against the darkness. The faint moonlight filtering in through the tree branches shone dimly on a snow-white, pinched face. Another alien appeared behind the second, then a third a few meters to the left. At least the aliens didn’t seem to have any sort of low-light gear; their eyes were uncovered.

“Dis ain’t good,” Rousseau whispered.

“Take the one on the left,” Mike barely breathed the words. “I’ll get the one on the right.”

“An’ de one in de’ back?”

Before Mike could reply, a horrible sound split the night. It was the screech of a banshee, a bubbling, horrendous outpouring of sound. Mike felt his bowels tighten suddenly as a dim shape leaped from a tree behind the two aliens in front of him, screeching to wake the dead.

It was the Cheyenne, Thomas Quiet Water, wielding his field-dressing knife. 

He almost decapitated the rearmost alien with a backhanded swipe, but the knife wedged in bone and was pulled from Thomas’s hand. He didn’t hesitate, even as the second alien spun, pointing his weapon. The Indian stepped inside the arc of the Grugell soldier’s swing, grabbing the arm and snapping it like a dry branch, continuing through in a fluid movement, grabbing the alien by the neck with his left hand and squeezing work-hardened fingers closed to the crackle of snapping bones. The alien fell in a heap.

The third Grugell fired a bolt of green fire, but too high. He didn’t get another chance.  Mike’s Colt spoke with authority, striking the alien’s shoulder, sending him spinning into the undergrowth.

“Damn,” Rousseau muttered.

Yuri Pyak crawled in a moment later, eyes questioning. “It be all over now, ami,” Rousseau assured him.

Thomas Quiet Water had calmly knelt beside the first fallen alien, worked his knife free and was wiping the blade clean on the black Grugell tunic. “Four, maybe five more,” he reminded the others.

“We have to stay put,” Mike informed them. “I set off my provisioning droid beacon. If the droids are still working, we should hear it coming any minute.”

“If we still alive in any minute, eh?”

A series of green bolts crisscrossed the air over their heads, forcing the scouts to crush themselves face down in the ferns. A lance of green flame brushed Mike’s temple ever so slightly, making his head explode with pain. He raised his head, catching a glimpse of a rake-thin form in the darkness. He fired twice with his old Colt to no avail.

“They’re all around us,” he gritted the words out through teeth clenched against the pain. 

“Two, five meters, in front,” Thomas Quiet Water whispered. “Two more behind us. Don’t know about any others.”

“Roll to your left,” Mike told him, “I’ll go right. Make some noise. I bet they’ll come right up the middle. Yuri, Beauregard, take ‘em when they come in.”

“Oui, je les ai.”

Mike heard a faint whine, slowly growing louder, approaching from the south. The provisioning droid was on its way in.

“Ready, go!”

Mike rolled as fast as he could to the right, hearing the crashing of fern fronds under his body matched by more crashing as Thomas Quiet Water rolled the other way. He rolled three meters and stopped, gasping in pain from the burn on his temple. Two bolts of green shot overhead, aimed at nothing in particular. The woods fell silent again.

They aren’t going to fall for it, Mike thought.

A few more seconds crept past. Then, the faintest sound of a cautious footstep in the ferns, to Mike’s left front. Another a few meters to the rear. The aliens were approaching, cautiously, scanning the woods for their enemy.

One of them paused, dimly illuminated in the faint moonlight filtering through the pines. His head was angled upwards, listening carefully to a steady whine, slowly growing louder, approaching from the south. From the river, a faint buzzing slowly grew louder. Reinforcements were on the way to the beleaguered Grugell troops.

Beauregard Rousseau struck upwards from the ferns suddenly, rearing up behind the Grugell and sinking a large skinning knife into the alien’s chest. Another Grugell soldier appeared suddenly, aiming his energy weapon at the Cajun, only to have his arm snapped by the huge barrel of Yuri Pyak’s Krupp cannon. Pyak continued the swing, shifting his grip on the huge gun, pivoting it on the action as the stock swung around to smash into the alien’s head. The Grugell soldier’s skull collapsed with a sickening crunch, and he fell into the undergrowth.

The night was split now with the whining drivers of the provisioning droid. Mike scrambled for his beacon, flipped open the top cover, and hit a large red button marked EVAC.

“Everybody get ready,” he called out. 

The droid came in over the trees, drives whining steadily. Several green bolts lanced into the air from the woods around them, slamming into the robotic hauler’s underside. The hand weapons didn’t seem to hurt it much, but Mike had no illusions what one of the Grugell’s flying spider-ships could do to the ponderous droid. He was certain they had little time to spare.

The droid hit its landing lights suddenly, blinding everyone on the ground. The robotic voice boomed out, “EMERGENCY BEACON DETECTED. STAY CLEAR OF LANDING AREA.” With a crash of tree branches, the droid crunched down through the forest, settling to a landing a few meters away from the beacon – and the scouts.

They scrambled for the droid’s slowly opening cargo door, pursued by blasts from the Grugell’s energy weapons. 

Yuri Pyak took a glancing hit and spun to the forest floor in front of Mike. Mike grabbed for the little Nenets, missing as Yuri rolled once and came up running, dropping his pack but retaining the giant Krupp cannon. Thomas Quiet Water appeared out of nowhere, bearing his rifle in one hand, holding the unconscious Albert Greene over one shoulder with the other. He tossed the Englishman in the cargo door and turned to face the others.

“We must go now!” he shouted. 

“Pas de merde!” Rousseau barked back. He was retreating slowly backwards towards the droid, firing his Parks double at the sources of each green bolt. Mike did the same, firing, breaking the action open, dunking in fresh rounds, and firing again. On his third shot, he was rewarded with a thin screech of pain from the unseen assailant behind the burst of green light.

Yuri Pyak appeared on the top of the droid, having scrambled up the side of the cargo bay. He crawled to the flat driver housing at the rear, dragging his Krupp cannon to a good firing position from which to punch high-explosive rounds into the trees. A Grugell flying platform appeared from the direction of the river, spitting green fire at the droid. Pyak fired at the platform, hitting it at the base of the T-handle and exploding vehicle and driver both in a white-hot flash. He shouted something in Nenets that sounded triumphant.

Mike and Rousseau arrived at the droid together, firing their last 15mm rounds at the tree line before tumbling backwards in the door. “’Ow we make dis t’ing go now?” Rousseau shouted.

Mike’s heart leaped. “The beacon!” The others stared. “It’s still out there!”

The droid lurched suddenly and began to climb out of the trees. “How?” Mike and Rousseau exclaimed together. They looked at each other, looked up to the trees rapidly falling away beneath the high steel walls of the cargo bay, and then towards the sounds of mad laughter from the top of the driver housing, where sat the grinning Yuri Pyak at the open panel containing the emergency manual controls.

“Yuri, Yuri fly, da?” he called down to the others.

“Je serai damné,” breathed Rousseau. Mike nodded in agreement.

The scouts collapsed against the walls of the cargo bay as the droid fled into the night sky. The whining of drivers and the laughter of the little Nenets echoed in the night as the robot hauler turned south for Settlement.

  The Grugell base camp

“Sir,” the communications technician turned from the panel to face Group Commander Dispotratik. “We have reports that our patrols on the river have made contact with an armed party of aliens. They’ve taken casualties, sir, but report that the perimeter is now secure. They repelled the aliens, and report at least five of the enemy killed.”

“Very well,” the newly anointed Group Commander replied. He glanced at his new rank insignia, which he’d placed on his uniform jacket immediately on receiving the message from the Imperium assigning him the task of completing the Occupation. “They know we’re here now. Send orders to the subunit commanders. All available troops are to begin movement to the river. Only minimal security and administration staff are to stay here at the base camp. We’ll attack as soon as possible.” He stood up, straightening his tunic. “I’m going to my quarters to prepare my gear. I’ll lead the attack myself.”

Dizzying visions of glory swam in Dispotratik’s head. Whatever these aliens were, they would doubtless be no match for Grugell military prowess.

To see more of Animal’s writing, visit his page at Crimson Dragon Publishing or Amazon.