Engines throbbed overhead: helicopter support. The nose of the boat beached. The eight-elf squad pitched over the side into leech-ridden mud and squelched ashore. Gilmuriel didn’t pause to watch the rest of the Forest King’s expeditionary force hitting the waterline. The elf, fine-fingered hand grasping his automatic pistol, pounded across the open space and hit jungle cover.
Squatting in the shade of a fronded tree, the other elves clustered around her, Aradmel Brightblade murmured, “We don’t even know what this ‘enemy’ is, Sergeant.”
“Isn’t what they are that’s important,” Dakashnit drawled. The dappled sun and shadow hid her even when Gilmuriel knew where he was looking for the orc. “These Bugs butchered Moondream’s squad, so we know they’re hostile. All we need to know is—where they are…”
Two youngsters—Dyraddin Treewaker and Bellurial Starharp, neither more than three centuries old, to Gilmuriel’s certain knowledge—abandoned interest in the mission and began discussing elven genealogies and the Lost Lands of the Oversea. Gilmuriel cuffed them.
“There is a term in the marines for this formation,” he snapped. “Clusterfuck. If you cluster up like that—we’re fucked! The enemy will waste all of us with one burst. Now let us get sorted out for line of march.”
The jungle fronds of Thyrion dripped a humid damp. Gilmuriel took a deep breath, smelling the decay of leaves, the spoor of beasts, and the age of the great spiring trees. His elven instincts shrieked at him of a wrongness in the rain-forest. A scent of evil beast, apart from orc; and metal, over and above the weapons of the elf marines.
The last sun to sift through the canopy illuminated Gilmuriel’s blond hair and woodland cammo bandanna. Weighed down under kit, he crouched with the black-haired radio elf beside him.
“Now listen up, you elves! This is our first real combat mission. We are to be in position on Hill 300 before dawn, dug in, with the rest of the company. Daylight will be the signal for the assault on the enemy. We’re going to hold back the Bug advance from the City of the Trees.”
The damp vapours of Thyrion Forest wreathed. The slide and lock of M16 bolts sounded muffled under the heat haze, and the omnipresent buzzing of insects.
“You may think the Forest King has sent us out to hold where no force could hold, to give up our lives in the hope it will buy time for the rest of the free peoples. If so, well and good. The long lives of the elven kind are not lightly given up, except in the cause of a great sacrifice.”
Dakashnit gave a baritone chuckle. She sprawled back in a bush, massive bow-legs spread, scratching at her crotch through ragged combat trousers. Thyrion’s insect population swarmed over her black hide; the few that managed to bite through it falling off, poisoned.
“Last stand be buggered!” Camouflage paint irregularly striped the sergeant’s craggy, grinning features. “L.t., if it gets too hot, we’re outta here. We’re professional soldiers—we get paid for running away.”
Dakashnit slid silently to her feet, weighted down with ammunition belts, grenades, and with a belt-fed General Purpose Machinegun resting idly across one broad shoulder.
“Recap. Basic marine technique for reporting the sighting of hostiles. If you see one enemy…” Dakashnit raised a sharp-taloned finger. “You hold up one finger. This is two enemy sighted. This is three.”
The orc held up four taloned fingers.
“This is many.”
Silthanis Blackrose solemnly nodded. Sergeant Dakashnit nodded at him. “Corporal, how many enemy is this?”
The tall, pudgy elf regarded the whole orc-hand held up.
“Don’t know, Sarge,” he admitted.
“That,” Dakashnit said, “is too many. Now. Them Bugs is steaming west, towards the centres of highest population density. So let’s go give ’em a hard time!”
Festooned with packs, water-bottles, spare magazines, entrenching tools, and everything else they assumed useful, the eight tall and delicate-boned elves grinned back at their sergeant. “Yo!”
“Now you listen up,” Dakashnit repeated, in a tone that for an orc was gentle. “Out here we’re gonna be depending on each other. You screw up, you gonna get somebody else killed. Do you hear me? You watch your buddy’s back. Your buddy watches yours. If anyone goes down, you tell me or the L.t. about it, and you don’t wait. Now I don’t wanna hear any more talk about nobly laying down our lives. We’re marines! What are we gonna do?”
“Kick ass, Sergeant!” the tiny radio operator, Byrna Silkentress, squeaked.
Dakashnit beamed. “That’s what I like to hear. Keep your heads down and your eyes open. And just remember—a sucking chest wound is Nature’s way of telling you to stay out of a firefight…”
Several hours of tactical night movement through another part of the Forest of Thyrion, which resembled exactly every other part of the Forest of Thyrion, brought them to within striking distance of their startline objective. Gilmuriel paused on the edge of a clearing, letting his elvish vision read the map by starlight.
Aradmel Brightblade began a hymn of praise to the stars, and abruptly clapped her hand over her mouth.
The gunnery sergeant, night-vision equally good, peered over Gilmuriel’s shoulder. “I don’t reckon we’re headed right, L.t.”
“We need no maps!” Gilmuriel folded his and returned it to his map-case. “We are elves in the ancient forest of our forefathers. This way.”
After an hour and a half of increasingly slow movement, Gilmuriel was about to consult the map again and damn elvish instincts when starlight skylined a distinctive ridge and vast goldentrees.
“Well, whaddya know?” Sergeant Dakashnit breathed. “Okay, you elves, let’s see you dug in quietly.”
“We are elves,” Gilmuriel objected. “We shall take to the trees.”
“Man, I don’t care if you take to drink!” the squat orc hissed. “But we is part of a company attack, which is part of a brigade attack, which means we do what we’re told, when we’re told, and we was told to dig in, not roost up in the trees like the fucking birds!”
Lieutenant Gilmuriel’s eyes glowed golden in the forest dark. “I didn’t ask for an argument, Sergeant. I gave you an order!”
Dawn brought first the screeching and warbling of ten thousand birds, before light showed in the sky. Night had chilled the earth below the ridge: now it began to smell again of rot and decaying meat. Thyrion’s trees are strong and wide. The eight elves, in buddy-buddy pairs among the branches, ate their waybread, a certain professionalism apparent. Four ate, four others attended to radio, weapons check, and sentry duty.
A talon tapped a weapon. Gilmuriel automatically glanced towards the sound.
Sergeant Dakashnit sprawled on an outer branch, belly down, peering through the thinning leaves on the tree’s east side. She tapped her shoulder and then her head. Gilmuriel moved lightly out to crouch beside her.
Dawn shone into the valley below the ridge.
“I smell something I don’t like, L.t.”
Gilmuriel’s gaze swept the ridge on the far side of the valley, seeking smoke, or any sign that the enemy were encamped where orcish Military Intelligence had reported.
The rising morning vapours drifted unchecked.
The sun growing warm on his face, Gilmuriel spat. “That hill is as bare as a dwarf’s bottom. There aren’t any Bugs there.”
Dakashnit wordlessly pointed downwards.