Chapter Twenty-three

Were you satisfied with my men?

—last words of Commandant Faurax,
killed at Dogba, Dahomey,
French Foreign Legion, 1892

“Keep down! Wogs coming through!” the sapper called over his radio, and Kelly flattened herself behind the cover of a half-ruined fusand stairway, one that led up to the roof of the structure they used as the motor pool back at the Sandcastle. Moving and fighting underwater was awkward. She had thought her Navy training in zero-G operations would help, but so far she’d found it heavy going just to keep up with the rest of the sapper platoon. She was glad of the chance to rest while they waited for the band of nomads to swim past, heading for the fighting on the far side of the compound.

They had worked their way around the wall after leaving the breach, trying to avoid contact for as long as possible. Fraser and Trent were supposed to keep the defenders occupied while the sappers took care of the Toel ship. If that vessel got airborne it could cause a lot of damage, and now that the aliens had revealed themselves once they had no further reason for staying hidden. The Toeljuk Autarchy had never been slow to use whatever methods were necessary to achieve their goals. If anything, it was a surprise that they hadn’t already used the ship for an attack on the Sandcastle. But the Toels probably preferred not to risk their ticket home, against the same Grendels that had knocked out their assault vehicle.

The last report from Fraser suggested he was doing his part of the job. Garcia had passed the word that the recon lances were under heavy attack from nomads, and Katrina Voskovich aboard the Cyclops had relayed a sonar report that suggested the wogs engaged with Hawley had dispatched most of their reserves to support the base.

That would make Hawley’s situation a little less desperate, but it also meant that at least part of Fraser’s battle plan was already unraveling. He’d counted on Hawley’s main body to keep most of the enemy distracted.

At least they’d bought some time this way. But if the battle here lasted more than fifteen or twenty minutes the nomads would be getting reinforcements, and that would spell disaster.

Everything was balanced on a knife edge.…

Something hissed through the water from above them, striking Legionnaire Gordon squarely in his backpack thruster unit. The projectile exploded, and in the same moment the thruster controls shorted out. Gordon’s body convulsed a few times.

Then Kelly was too busy to notice the casualty, as more shots plowed toward her unit like so many tiny torpedoes. She rolled in the water and fired a long burst from her FEK. As she cut in her thruster and raced for cover, she saw their attackers. Not the sleek, elongated figures of the wogs, these were squat, with a dozen thick tentacles and many more smaller ones, wearing uniforms with many of the same characteristics as her own battledress and carrying strangely-shaped weapons no human hand could have made or used.

The Toels had discovered them. And there was no way any of her sappers was going to run the gauntlet and reach the spaceship as long as the fighting went on.…

O O O

“Onagers forward!” Fraser called. “Stand clear!”

Four legionnaires took up positions in front of his ragged skirmish line. Unlike the rest of the legionnaires, they didn’t have hardsuits. Their regular combat armor was sealed against all environments, including the incredible heat generated by their plasma weapons. Hardsuits were less effective, and it was wise to give the onager gunners a wide berth.

The Alpha Company corporal in the garishly decorated armor called out the order to fire, and the onagers flared bright in the water. They kept up a steady barrage, and after a few seconds there were no more nomads to threaten their position.

That wouldn’t last long. This was the fourth wave of native soldiers that had been entirely wiped out. Choor! evidently wasn’t worrying much about controlling his soldiers’ fighting instincts when it came to the defense of his headquarters. And even with a sizable number facing Hawley’s force outside the compound, there were plenty of wogs to expend.

“Casualties!” he snapped.

Garcia repeated the order, waited as she received replies from each lance, then responded. “Three killed. Valdez, Martin, and Llewellyn. And Vrurrth took some shrapnel in that last rocket attack, but Corporal Rostov says it’s superficial.”

That brought the total dead since the start of the assault to seven. “Tighten up the sonar watch,” he ordered. “We’ve got to spot them before they launch another attack.” It was getting to be a pattern. The wogs would get in the first shot by sneaking up on the legionnaires, and men would die. Then the Legion weaponry would shatter the enemy assault. He couldn’t afford to keep on fighting a war of attrition, though. Not when the nomads had a seemingly endless supply of replacements, and more on the way from outside.

“Sir, Warrant Officer Kelly reports the Sapper Platoon has come under attack by Toels approximately seventy meters from the grounded ship. They are pinned down and requesting reinforcements.”

Kelly.…

Fraser fought the urge to snap out orders to split up his force and launch a relief mission. That would just give the nomads a better chance of defeating them all in detail. “Tell her to hang on as long as possible, Garcia,” he said. “We’ve got problems of our own.”

Even as he spoke, his sonar display showed movement to the left and down near the bottom. Another attack getting organized? Probably.

“We’ll get her help as soon as we can,” he finished. He shifted to the private channel that linked him to Trent. “Gunny. We’re getting targets bearing two-five-seven, down.”

“I see them, skipper,” Trent replied.

“Let’s make them uncomfortable. Take Rostov and Pascali. Call for backup if you need to.” It took all his control to keep his impatience and anxiety from showing. He didn’t like the thought of what would happen if Kelly was captured by those Toels. They were one of the few races that preferred slave labor to automation.…

Too many enemies, too few legionnaires to carry out his ambitious attack plan. Everybody else had been right. Now they were paying the price for his mistakes.

O O O

Hawley watched the sonar display, fascinated by the unfolding battle. It was so much like one of his simulations, this movement of tiny dots across his faceplate display. The legionnaires in Gage’s force were falling back steadily, managing to stay just out of reach of the pursuing nomads. Just a few more minutes …

He welcomed the feeling that it was all just another elaborate simulation. When he thought of the battle in terms of a real conflict, with real casualties and an outcome that depended entirely on his own decisions, panic would scream within him.

Reality took him back to that day on Aten, to the fears of failure and the sickening realization of loss each time a man died. Far better to think of them all as units in a game, unfeeling, imaginary.

Perhaps if he could have done that, things would have gone differently all along. A few better breaks here and there and he’d be a brigadier now, ready to retire after a long and honorable career. Instead of being a failure whose single moment of glory had been lost in a lifetime of uselessness.…

No! He couldn’t keep mourning a lost past. It was time to live in the present. His men needed him now.

Now …

It was time to act. “Jurgensen! Start broadcasting the wog voice recording!” He switched to the general transmission channel. “Come on, boys, let’s show those wogs what the Legion’s made of!”

“Legion!” half a hundred voices replied. Then someone else shouted “Hawley! Hawley!” and the others took it up. He had forgotten the thrill of it, the feeling of belonging that was part of being an officer of the Legion.

The legionnaires broke from cover, opening fire at the rear ranks of the nomads chasing Gage. The trap was sprung.…

“Now!” Gage shouted. “Turn and give ’em hell, Alphas!”

The two depleted platoons responded flawlessly, pivoting in the water and unleashing a murderous FEK barrage against the closest wog troops. Following so close upon Hawley’s ambush, this counterattack destroyed the last of their cohesion. A moment ago the natives had been a disciplined fighting force. Now they were a mob, trapped in a deadly crossfire, unable to react quickly enough as the initiative suddenly shifted to the Legion.

But the confusion didn’t diminish the individual bravery of the wogs. They still fought fearlessly, and they still outnumbered the legionnaires by a wide margin. If they got a chance to reorganize, they’d still be dangerous.

She gestured to Massire. “Make sure that wog noise is playing loud and clear,” she ordered. They had to make sure that Choor! didn’t start coordinating this battle again. There wouldn’t be much chance of that, as long as the wogs were getting a double dose of DuValier’s recording from each of the two Terran forces.

Massire gave a thumbs-up, but a moment later a native rocket bullet tore a hole through his chest. He was dead before Gage could reach him.…

“Tsiolkov!” she called to the nearest legionnaire. “Take the C3 unit.” She paused to fire a long FEK burst before shouting again. “Hit them! Hit them hard!”

O O O

“Hit the bastards again!” Corporal Mike Johnson shouted. “No, not like that, you stupid son of a strakk!”

He grabbed an FEK out of a civilian’s hands and snapped the selector switch from full-auto to the three-round burst fire setting. “Don’t just pump out a whole strakking clip, for Chrissakes! We want some ammo for the next attack, too!”

A couple of the Seafarms people laughed, sounding relieved. If the legionnaire could talk about the next fight, maybe they really could come through this.…

The assault had been going on for close to half an hour now. Unlike the previous attacks against the Sandcastle, this one hadn’t involved any finesse or maneuvering on the part of the wogs. They’d just come boiling out of the sea from all directions at once, trying to overwhelm the defenses.

Luckily, the magrep generators had slowed them down, so that even the armed civilians could hold the walls. The worst weak spots were the shattered gates and a short section of the wall near the Seafarms office block, where one of the magrep modules had been removed to outfit the barge Fraser’s men were using for their attack on the enemy base.

Lieutenant DuValier had the gate area. It was up to Johnson to take charge at this other danger zone. But it wouldn’t pay to ignore the rest of the perimeter, either. If any of the generators failed, or if the nomads forced their way through despite them, the civilians wouldn’t be much of a match for the wogs.

He thrust the battle rifle back into the man’s hands and pointed at the crowded waters below. “Now let ’em know you mean business!”

Limping on his injured leg, stiff and tingling inside the regen cast still strapped there, Johnson moved back. It was hard to let the civilians do the fighting while he just looked on, but Lieutenant DuValier had told him that the best thing the legionnaires in the Sandcastle could do was stay back and direct the defense. An officer couldn’t allow himself to be drawn so deeply into the fighting that he didn’t pay attention to what was happening all across the battlefield. And for all intents and purposes Johnson was an officer now. With two other wounded legionnaires, he was in command of what amounted to two full platoons.

It was a responsibility he gladly would have traded for his old lance command, but he wasn’t going to let Captain Fraser down. Or DuValier, who despite the abortive mutiny had been a powerhouse, organizing the defense since Hawley and Fraser had left aboard the Cyclops.

“Corporal! Corporal!” That was Legionnaire Myaighee, the injured alien from Watanabe’s platoon who was operating Johnson’s C3 unit. “Trouble by the gatehouse, Corporal. A major attack this time. Wogs have penetrated the gates and are attacking the lieutenant’s position from three sides now!”

“Pass the word to Wu,” Johnson ordered. “Tell him to round up … five civilians from each unit and get over to the gatehouse right away. Grab five of our people to go, too!”

The hannie saluted and hurried off. Johnson scanned the sea again. If they could just keep holding until Captain Fraser smashed the enemy base.…

O O O

DuValier crouched behind the rampart and slapped his last magazine into his FEK. He’d run out of grenades long since, and it wouldn’t be long before he was out of needle rounds as well.

In which case, he told himself, he’d throw shards of fusand at any wog who tried to climb onto the gatehouse roof. If this was going to be another disaster like Fenris, he wasn’t planning on surviving the massacre. This time he’d go out fighting, and he’d take as many wogs with him as he could manage. Antoine DuValier wanted an honor guard to escort him to Hell.

He leaned over the rampart and fired down, heedless of the questing rocket bullets and crossbow bolts that responded to his fire. There were only eleven Seafarms men left on the walls around him out of the fifty he’d started with, and four of them were wounded. The technician with his C3 pack had tumbled off the roof a few minutes earlier, so he didn’t have any way of raising the rest of the defenders now. Corporal Johnson would have to keep up the fight as best he could.…

He kept on firing until the clip ran dry, then threw the FEK at a nomad climbing slowly up the inner wall. Another rifle lay nearby where someone had dropped it. DuValier scrambled for it, checked the magazine, and brought it up to fire a burst into a wog climbing over the parapet. The nomad screeched and fell over backward, hitting the water below with a loud splash.

Panting, DuValier crouched for a long moment. If the Sandcastle fell, at least he’d die with a weapon in his hands. Captain Fraser had given him that much.

If he had worked with Fraser all along, instead of letting his hate blind him to the man’s nature, perhaps none of them would be in this corner now. Or maybe this would have been the outcome no matter what.

All that really mattered anymore was the battle. DuValier raised the battle rifle again and thrust himself back into the fray.

O O O

“Here they come again!” someone shouted. Hawley braced the FEK in his hands and strained to see through the murky water. The battle had churned up mud and blood that made it hard to spot anything more than a few meters away. That was giving the wogs an advantage, despite the Legion sonars. In this confused battle it was impossible to follow all the enemy targets successfully, and when a nomad erupted from a liquid fog at close range he had all the benefits of speed and familiarity with the environment. Most of the Legion casualties in this fight were coming from sword cuts and spear thrusts, not the high-tech weaponry supplied by the Toels.

There was an irony somewhere in there, but Hawley wasn’t laughing.

Nearby, Subaltern Watanabe and a corporal named Radescu raised their weapons and fired almost simultaneously as a trio of wogs broke into view. Radescu screamed as a heavy-bladed sword drove downward through his shoulder and deep into his torso, but the nomads thrashed and bled under the subaltern’s withering fire. More inhuman shapes appeared, and Hawley added his FEK’s voice to the battle.

The nomads were broken as a fighting force, but they were still attacking anywhere they could. It looked as though this time they were going to keep on fighting until there were no wogs left at all. A lot more legionnaires would die as well.

The butcher’s bill was going to hurt later, but for now Hawley had a battle to fight. He didn’t even need the fiction of a game anymore. All that mattered was keeping these wogs tied up until Colin Fraser could win the fight inside the compound. And that was just what Hawley would do, no matter what the cost might be.

“Sir!” That was Jurgensen, sticking close beside him despite the double encumbrance of the thruster unit and his C3 pack. “Cyclops reports that bunch of wogs heading back for the base has broken up. Some of them are heading for us again. Sounds like they’re completely disorganized.”

“Acknowledge the report,” he said, his mind wrestling with the new information. It sounded like Choor!’s war machine was breaking down. Those nomads would want to rally around their own clans as the fighting became general. The wog commander would know that the defense of the base was most important, but in the long run his coalition was still weaker than the individual clan loyalties within it.

That would help Fraser. But the last thing he needed out here was more nomads.…

“Captain! Look out!” Watanabe yelled the warning too late. A nomad spear seemed to come from nowhere, thrusting into the pit of his stomach. The pain was like nothing he’d ever felt before.

He tried to shoot at the wog, as the nomad yanked the spear clear and thrust again, but he’d dropped his FEK. The pain redoubled, and Hawley bent double, clutching his injured stomach and sobbing.

The wog shuddered and thrashed as a hail of needle rounds ripped through him. A moment later Watanabe was there, fumbling at his first aid kit. “Medic! Medic!” he yelled.

“Save … save it,” Hawley gasped out. “Nothing … a medic … can do for … me. Not now.…”

“Take it easy, sir,” Watanabe was saying, as he moved closer to examine the wound. Even through his faceplate his grave expression was clear enough. The subaltern knew the wound was a mortal one.

“More … nomads … on the way …” Hawley forced the words out, trying to ignore the burning pain in his gut. “Must … unify.… Join Gage … Hit them all together… No defeat in detail.…” It was all clear in his mind, but he didn’t know if he was making sense to Watanabe. Marshal Vigny had allowed an Alliance relief force to smash into his troops while they were still dispersed after the first part of the Battle of Dijon, and the afternoon battle had ended with the rout of the French and the final collapse of the Imperial resistance in Metropolitan France at the end of the Grand Crusade.

The battle was clear in his mind, as clear as this fight against the wogs. But he couldn’t find the words to explain it.…

Gage and Watanabe could handle the fight. They’d beat the wogs cold. With these legionnaires, they could do anything.

He rallied enough to go on. “Tell … tell the men … I’m proud of them all.…”

And blackness descended on him for the last time.