Lissa leaped onto the barricade of flesh and lobbed a grenade into the tunnel. Its explosion shook the whole cave — stones fell from the ceiling; smoke filled the area.
I staggered back a few steps, turned and glanced at the front of the cave. A huge gray-brown bear was rearing on its hind legs, roaring and swinging its clawed paws at the troopers ringed around it like midgets. A dozen rifles blasts hit it, but the bear stalked forward, into the cave, as the soldiers fell back. Behind it I could see wolves and stinking great cats with saber fangs.
The cannon fired its searing beam of raw red energy into the bear’s chest, blasting the beast in two, blood and bone and flesh splattering in every direction. As it toppled to the cave floor, already slippery with blood, the soldiers turned their weapons on the wolves and saber-toothed cats.
I looked back at the tunnel mouth we were guarding. Lissa was busily rigging explosive charges, sitting on the floor, her back to the barricade of dead bodies, her rifle on the ground beside her.
I went to her and peered into the murky darkness of the tunnel.
“There don’t seem to be any more of them coming from this direction,” I said.
I could sense her nodding inside her helmet. “This will seal off the tunnel.” She lifted with both hands a set of grenades that she had wired together. “Then we can seal off the other one, farther back.”
I agreed to her plan. Quickly she dropped her explosive package into the tunnel. We flattened out against the solid rock wall as she counted off five seconds. The blast jarred me almost to my knees, but when the smoke cleared, Lissa shone her helmet light into the tunnel and laughed lightheartedly.
“It’ll take them awhile to dig through that,” she said triumphantly.
Within minutes she had blasted the other tunnel shut, and we joined the others at the front of the cave.
Wave after wave of animals attacked us, and we battled them back. Huge, ferocious bears, snarling wolves and smaller dogs, saber-toothed mountain lions. We killed them by the dozens, by the score, by the hundreds. The nighttime darkness was lit by the glow of our energy weapons; the stars themselves faded from the sky in the blood-red light of our killing beams. Through the padding of my helmet and earphones I could hear the screaming, howling, shrieking roars of pain and fury as the animals were driven at us by Ahriman’s diabolical powers, only to be slaughtered by the blazing energies of our guns.
Off in the distance, barely seen against the flickering shadows, I could now and then glimpse one of the brutes, skulking among the poor savage beasts that they were commanding. But they never came close enough to kill; they stayed their distance, as if they knew that what had happened to their comrades at the tunnel would happen to them.
I heard a voice in my head calling to them, daring them, challenging them: Come and fight us yourselves! Leave these poor dumb beasts alone and take up the fight, face to face. Come and meet the death you hand out so freely to others.
But they hung back, keeping to the shadows.
After long hours of fighting, I realized that the cannon had gone silent. The lights in the cave were out; we fought by the light of our weapons and the lamps built into our helmets now. My own rifle finally quit on me, and I began to use my pistol, instead.
As dawn tinted the sky with a grayish pink, the attacks stopped. The ground in front of the cave, once smooth with pristine snow, was a blackened, bloodied shambles of dead beasts, shattered limbs, bodies ripped open, flesh torn apart.
I looked around me. Four soldiers were down, their helmets and armor broken, blood-soaked. Counting Ogun, back by the tunnel, we had lost five. There were only eleven of us left alive, and three of them were wounded, including Kedar. His leg had been broken when a bear charged into the cave and made it almost to the power packs.
Lissa and several others began tending to the wounded. I went to Adena, who was surveying the battlefield with a powerful pair of electronically boosted binoculars.
“They’re leaving,” she said, as if she knew I was beside her. “The brutes are moving off to the south.”
“We’ve won,” I said.
She handed the binoculars to me. “Not until we’ve killed the last one of them.”
I looked out toward the south. Through the magnification of the binoculars I saw eight people like Ahriman shambling through the snow. There was no sign of any animals with them. No tracks except their own. Not even a dog accompanied them.
“They’ve thrown everything they have at us,” I said, “and we beat them off. They’ve lost.”
Adena’s visor was up, and I could see that her face was set in grim determination. “No, Orion. We may have won this battle, but the war is not finished. Our task is to exterminate them.”
“Those eight…”
She nodded. “Those last eight brutes must be killed, Orion. We have to go out after them.”
“Is that Ormazd’s command?” I asked her.
The corners of her mouth curved slightly in the beginning of a smile. “It is my command, Orion. It is what must be done.”
CHAPTER 39
She gave orders quickly, efficiently. Kedar and the other wounded would remain in the cave. The rest of us started out after the fleeing enemy, without pausing for rest. We gulped down food capsules as we slogged through the knee-deep snow, following the trail left by the brutes, under a clean blue morning sky. The air was cold but still, as chilled and delicious as wine.
“Eight of us against eight of them,” I said as I marched beside Adena. “Ormazd arranges things neatly.”
She gazed at me, her gray eyes gleaming in the reflection of the morning sun against the pure white snow.
“You mustn’t think that Ormazd is doing all this for his entertainment, Orion,” she said. “We are dealing with the fate of the universe here, the maintenance of the continuum.”
“By hunting down a handful of people…”
“ Ahriman’speople,” she corrected. “Our enemies.”
“Whose most powerful weapon is some sort of electrostatic wand, while we have laser guns that can cut them down at a thousand yards.”
“Do you think it would be fairer if we fought them hand-to-hand?” She almost seemed amused. “The power packs that heat our suits and energize our weapons will be drained soon enough. The main power packs back in the cave are completely drained. We’ll be fighting them hand-to-hand soon enough, Orion. Will that please you?”
I had to admit that it did not.
“They must be exterminated,” Adena went on, her face utterly serious now. “Every last one of them, including Ahriman. Especially Ahriman. You understand that, don’t you?”
With a reluctant nod, I replied, “I understand that Ormazd wants it so. I understand that Ahriman wants to exterminate us. But I don’t like it.”
She gave me a strange, almost pitying glance. “Orion… we are not here to enjoy what we do. We do what must be done. We have no choice.”
I started to reply, but thought better of it and held my tongue.
We pushed on through deepening snow, walking in the tracks made by the enemy band. The sun shone brightly but without much heat out of a cloudless sky of perfect blue. Adena headed our little column; I walked beside her. Due south the tracks headed, through a featureless expanse of dazzling white snow. After long hours of marching, with nothing to do except plant one foot in front of the other and watch my breath puffing out in tiny clouds of steam, I saw a forest of huge pine trees rising on the horizon, their deep green a startling, welcome contrast to this world of white.