“Horrible,” Tulo’stenaloor replied. He turned to his operations officer with a snarl. “Pull all estanaral forces out that can be withdrawn; send only the local forces into this madness. Begin working on a plan to control the movement after the attack; we have been hitting these humans in waves which gives them time to recover. Use the estanaral forces to put gaps between blocks of the locals so that we hit the humans in a continuous stream.”
The operations officer nodded and tapped at the controls on his sensor unit. “Most of the estanaral were prepared for an exploitation attack, so they are back from the area where the weapon will hit. Should I stop the flow for a while? We’re actually getting low on local units.”
“No,” Tulo’stenaloor said after a moment. “We won’t know exactly where the weapon hits until it does. Some of them will survive. It is enough.” He flapped his crest again and keyed his communicator. “Orostan.”
Orostan looked up the hill at the gap and snarled as his communicator lit up. “Yes, estanaar.”
“The humans are going to fire a hell-weapon into the Gap.” Tulo’stenaloor gave him a brief précis of the situation and then waited.
Orostan flapped his crest in agitation and snarled. “How many of my reinforcements am I going to lose?”
“About half,” the warleader admitted.
“Too much,” the forward leader muttered. “That hellish SheVa gun has been reinforced, strengthened and given many weapons instead of just the one. It has taken a position near Savannah valley and is eating oolt as if they were abat.”
“The idea was to stop it,” Tulo’stenaloor noted. “Not have it stop you.”
“I’m trying,” Orostan snapped. “I have teams waiting for it to come through the pass. I think it is vulnerable on the flanks. When it comes through we will destroy its wheels and tracks. That will stop it. Short of where it can fire at the pass. But you were supposed to take and hold the pass, estanaar. And with the resistance that I am facing from these hell-spit humans, may the demons eat their souls, I need more forces.”
“I’m working on it,” Tulo’stenaloor said. “But the situation, as the humans say, truly sucks.”
“This really sucks,” Cally whispered. “I’m way too young to die.”
She had managed to break contact with the Posleen but they had stayed on her trail like bloodhounds. Now they were spread out on either side of her hide, beating up the hill. She had thought she could lie low and avoid them but it seemed no such luck.
“Papa wouldn’t have gotten trapped this way,” she muttered, checking her rounds. Out of grenades, two magazines left, one partially empty. One full magazine in the well. Posleen to the right so if she tried to sneak out they would have her there. Ditto on the left. Solid wall up behind her. What was that old saw? “There I was, this is no shit… Was I afraid, sure, I was afraid one of them would get away.”
She just wished they would go away.
There was a rustle in the bushes below and she lined up on where a Posleen would be bound and determined to come in view. “Well, time to get one more,” she sighed, snuggling her cheek into the stock. As the yellow-brown snout nosed around the bushes she took up trigger slack. It was the God King.
Even if she couldn’t destroy all the Posleen in the world, she could destroy this one.
The team leader paused and raised one fist, sinking into a crouch. Ahead of them through the trees there was a shot from a rifle and a crackle of railgun fire with the occasional thump of a plasma rifle.
Major Alejandro Levi had been a Cyberpunk for more years than he cared to remember. He had been recruited right out of high school, something about being a Westinghouse Scholarship Finalist and the quarterback of the football team. And over the… okay decades would be the best way to put it, he’d been in a lot of hairy missions. But wandering around in the middle of a nuclear battlefield scattered with Posleen, potentially hostile humans and potentially hostile “others,” pretty much took the cake.
He looked to his rear then to his side and stepped to the left. Suddenly, he reached out with his left hand and sank it into what appeared to be naked air.
“What do we have here?” he whispered, getting a grip with the other hand as a Himmit shifted camouflage and wrapped three of its hands onto his body. “Spying on us, were you?”
“Spying for you,” the Himmit whistled in passable English. The creature was almost man-sized but lighter than humans and resembled nothing so much as a symmetric frog. It had four “arms” set at opposite ends of its body and a sensory cluster near the center of the body. On each side of the sensory cluster it had a pair of eyes. It appeared as if you could split it down the middle and easily have two “half Himmit.”
Alejandro had it by the cranial cavity, at the center of the delicate sensory area; a twitch of the human’s strong hands would crush his primary sensors, a possibly fatal wound. “You’re here for the same reason I am!”
“How do I know that?” the Cyber said, loosening his grip lightly.
“You’re here to retrieve Cally O’Neal and Michael O’Neal, Senior,” the alien replied. “And you’re late.”
“The traffic was terrible,” Alejandro replied, dryly. “Where are they?”
“Michael O’Neal, Senior, was caught in the pressure wave fromisedander detonation and sustained mortal injuries. Cally O’Neal is the one doing the firing right now. She has been in a running battle with a group of Posleen. I believe she is now trapped.”
“O’Neal’s dead?” the team leader asked, shaking his head.
“Dead is such a definitive term,” the Himmit replied. “He is in my craft at the moment. I do not know his current state of reality.”
“Wha… never mind,” Alejandro said, shaking his head. If he asked an open-ended question the Himmit would go on all day. He was lucky this hadn’t taken longer; the Himmit was clearly out of sorts to be this abrupt. Maybe it was having fingers jabbed into the Himmit equivalent of a nose. “How many Posleen?”
“Less than when she started; she is a remarkable sub-human,” the Himmit said. “She initiated the ambush with — ”
“How many and where?” Levi asked, tightening the pressure ever so slightly.
“Fourteen, seventy-five meters,” the Himmit replied, pointing. “Spread out. She is in cover up the slope, but if she moves…”
“God King?”
“There is one Kessentai, plasma rifle, using portable sensors. He is not using them very effectively; he appears used to having his guns aimed for him.”
The Cyber straightened and made a series of gestures indicating that the team should spread out, prepare to engage the enemy and turn off all electronic devices. The last was a pain, but the God King’s sensors could pick up the slightest emission, even background.
He watched as the team seemed to appear from nowhere, a bit of leaf mold, the bark of a tree, a bush. The Cyberpunks had trained in the days before the war against the Posleen to enter enemy territory and corrupt battlefield systems that could not be “hacked” from a distance. They were trained to be ghosts, shadows, on the battlefield.
But they were also trained to be the deadliest ghosts on earth. Time to see if they were the fastest.
The Himmit watched them as they disappeared into the woods then followed at the fastest rate consonant with remaining concealed.