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  Without warning, I marched toward them. They scattered back.

  Then I stepped through the portal and vanished.

  Walking onto Gray Deck again, I felt a bit woozy. Maybe the techs had been trying to tell me something—but I didn’t care. I had to talk to Graves.

  “Sir! Primus, sir!”

  Graves spun around on one heel. He strode toward me purposefully, leaving a team of techs in his wake.

  “McGill? What the hell are you doing back here—what’s the matter, man? Are you hit?”

  “I…” I said. I stumbled and fell. My hand went out, but it only partially broke my fall.

  “Medic!” Graves called out.

  I felt rough hands on me. I expected to be helped onto my feet, but that wasn’t Graves’ way. Instead, he flipped me over on my back, grunting with the effort.

  “I don’t see any injuries. Did you breathe the air?”

  “I did, sir—”

  “Poison, then. Where’s that damned bio—?”

  My hand shot up and gripped his arm. I pulled him back around to face me.

  “Sir… it’s the ship. I saw it. The alien ship—they fixed the door. It’s closing, right now.”

  His eyes widened. “Are you sure?”

  “Positive, sir. Visual confirmation.”

  “Right… and you were on radio silence, so you walked back to report. I get it—but I don’t know what we can do about it.”

  “Maybe send in another commando team of jumpers. Right now, with a bomb. Maybe they can do it again.”

  “Don’t you think they’ll be prepared for that this time?”

  “Maybe, sir, but we have to—”

  “What’s wrong with you anyway, McGill? Your voice is weakening. You’re going pale.”

  A bio specialist finally wandered up and began to work on me.

  “Blood loss. Nothing visible… it must be internal. I’m reading several ruptured organs. Did you fall off a building, Centurion?”

  “Not lately,” I said. “It’s probably because the gateway wasn’t calibrated yet.”

  The bio pulled out a syringe and prepped it.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “It’s a cure-all,” she said, giving me smirk.

  Now, I wasn’t born yesterday. I knew what she was up to. She was just as lazy as your average bio. They’d all rather stuff a man into the recycling blades than work up a sweat trying to save him.

  “Sir! Graves, sir!”

  “What is it, McGill? I’m trying to figure out a course of action.”

  “This woman is trying to off me, Primus. I just thought you might like to know.”

  Graves stepped toward us. He frowned at me, then at the bio. He shook his head. “I can’t use a man who’s crippled. Not now—not ever,” he said coldly. “Kill him.”

  I didn’t put up a fight. That was mostly because I was too weak to do so. I could barely catch my breath.

  A moment later, I felt a sting.

  My heart beat seven more times after that, then I died.

  -32-

  Awakening with a growl, I pushed people away with rubbery fingers. They backed off while saying soothing things.

  I didn’t listen. I got my feet off the gurney and almost did a facer right there—but I caught myself. This wasn’t my first rodeo.

  “Centurion? Let me check you out first, please.”

  Squinting at brilliant lights that stabbed into my skull, I let her fool around—but only until I was strong enough to brush her aside. I got into the shower and dressed.

  “What’s my score?” I asked her.

  “I don’t know,” she huffed. “You wouldn’t let me finish all the routine tests.”

  She sounded pissed off, but I didn’t care. I wasn’t looking for a date—not today.

  Staggering down the ship’s passages, each step I took became more purposeful. Soon, my eyes worked well enough to read the time on my tapper.

  I’d only been dead for twenty-nine minutes. That made me grin.

  Dead for less than half an hour? I thought that might be a personal record. There must not have been anyone else lingering in the death-queue.

  But I was pretty familiar with hostile planets. I figured that state of affairs wouldn’t last long.

  Graves was busy on Gray Deck when I caught up with him again.

  “McGill, reporting for duty, sir!”

  He glanced at me, then turned back to the unit he was marching through a set of gateway posts. Centurion Manfred passed by in the lead. I gave him a wave, and he gave me the finger.

  When the unit was off, Graves turned back to me.

  “Feeling better, McGill?”

  “Right as rain, sir.”

  “No hard feelings this time?”

  I looked startled. “What? About offing me just half an hour ago? Hell no, sir. You had to do it. I was messed up pretty badly.”

  He nodded. “That’s the right attitude. I don’t want any whiners in my outfit. Now, get your ass back down there. Things are heating up. Your unit is in action, and they’ve got no centurion.”

  “Uh…” I said, dumbfounded. “Has there been a change of plan? My recon team did all they could. Shouldn’t we pull out and—”

  “And what? Sit on Legate? In case you haven’t heard, McGill, Legion Varus is a ground force. The enemy has shut that door you opened up, so we can’t board her. We’re going to take 51 Peg back instead.”

  “Okay… Full deployment?”

  “It’s already underway. We used your beachhead as a starting point. Varus, Solstice, and our supporting near-human legions—they’re all deploying as fast as they can. We’ll see what they throw at us, we’ll kill it all, and then it will be their move after that.”

  “You make it sound pretty easy, sir.”

  Graves gave me a reproachful look. “Well? What are you waiting for? There are enemy vehicles of some kind approaching your troops right now. Walking armored units.”

  “Armored, huh? All right. See you down there.”

  Taking advantage of a break in the endless stream of men and material, I marched through the posts and transferred my existence down to the planet surface.

  It was kind of like walking into a giant bug-zapper. You felt like you’d been blasted apart, burnt away to dust, and knitted back into a whole piece again someplace else. The sensation was enough to make a man wince, I don’t mind telling you.

  Marching out at the far end of the gateway, I was startled to see how many troops had appeared. There were thousands already, with at least four gateway posts working continuously.

  In the night air, I could hear that zapping sound every few seconds. Even the wind didn’t completely carry away the stink of burnt hair and ozone that those strange devices always left behind.

  “McGill!” Manfred called out. He came trotting up toward me. Built like a barrel, the man walked with a swaying step. “When I saw you up there talking to Graves, I thought you were chicken-shit or something.”

  “No such luck,” I told him. “You’re going to have to share your medals with me tonight.”

  Manfred smiled, but then quickly became business-like. He pointed to the corner of the night that was slightly brighter than the rest of it. “They’re coming from the Peg city. Thousands of them. Half-metal, half-meat. An army of walking dead things.”

  “Who is in charge of setting up our defensive lines?” I asked.

  Manfred winced. “Turov.”

  I gave him an apologetic nod. No matter our personal lives, everybody knew she wasn’t the best choice for a field commander. In fact, she was pretty bad.

  “She’s building a bunker in those trees for herself,” he said, pointing south. “We’ve been ordered to take high ground and dig trenches with the pigs. Choose your unit’s position on the line and set up camp. It’s going to be an all-out firefight by dawn.”

  I gazed upward then, looking at the warm sky. The only moon in sight was the invasion ship.

  T
he land surrounding us was comprised of rolling hills with standing groves of weird-looking trees. There were dark clumps of them in every lower fold. The higher ground was grassy and wind-blown.

  “Over there,” I said. My finger aimed at the highest bald hump in the land. “I’ll set up there.”

  Manfred looked and laughed. “Perfect. You won’t miss a thing. I’ll set up on your west flank where there’s plenty of cover.”

  Meeting with my unit, I directed them to move out toward our new hilltop. While they gathered their gear Harris approached me.

  “Uh… sir?” he asked. “Wouldn’t it be more prudent to stay in the center of the formation where we’d be less exposed?”

  “Maybe so, Adjunct,” I told him. “Just one thing, though: I’m no sissy. I like a challenge.”

  Leeson laughed at Harris, and he glared at both of us.

  We soon set up on the west flank of the legion. Downhill from our spot was a dense growth of trees. Manfred set up down there.

  “Those trees are freaky,” Adjunct Barton said staring downhill. “Those hanging growths—they must be fruit or something, right sir?”

  I glanced at the trees. They were odd… it looked like dead monkeys hung from the branches.

  “Just the local flora, Barton,” I told her.

  Lifting my rifle, I fired into the closest tree, nailing one of the odd-looking pods.

  To my surprise, the pod-like thing opened leathery wings and shrieked, flapping awkwardly away. After about a hundred meters of flapping, it dropped like a stone.

  “You killed it, sir,” Barton said reproachfully.

  “Huh… Well, at least we know they’re harmless.”

  Pigs were employed to dig trenches in minutes. We set up in the trenches and formed a rude defensive line. Kivi put out drones, auto-turrets and pop-up bombs. By dawn, we had a fairly functional fortification.

  In front of us, downslope, a near-human cohort set up a more primitive position. The heavy infantry were too big to be completely covered by a standard-depth trench, but nobody seemed to care, not even the big men who hunkered there.

  Lastly, we set up 88s on the highest spots. Back behind the hill others deployed star-falls.

  “That’s heavy artillery, that is,” Leeson observed, coming to visit my part of the trench. “You think the enemy has seen anything like a star-fall yet?”

  “Maybe not here on Peg 51,” I admitted. “The Pegs wouldn’t have had much in the way of defensive ground forces.”

  “According to one of those briefings you ignored, they have police robots and whatnot. That’s about it.”

  I glanced at him, but he didn’t meet my eye. I didn’t complain about his implicit suggestion indicating I hadn’t studied this enemy. We all knew each other pretty well by now, and Leeson was right, I hadn’t bothered.

  Less than a minute later, the sky lit up. We all ducked until we realized it was our side that had fired first.

  The star-falls sent bolts of energy in glimmering arcs that moved at a surprisingly low speed. This kind of artillery was supposed to be able to penetrate the various types of protective force-shielding that protected modern armies from missiles and aerial assaults.

  Like meteors crashing in slow-motion, the salvoes rose high before falling to the ground again, smashing everything they landed on. In the distance to the south, where the Peg city lay, brilliant flashes glared. Each impact lit up the night down there as if it was broad daylight.

  I knew from long experience the dirt would be fused into glass and radioactivity levels would spike at ground-zero. Anything within a hundred meters, shielded or not, would be vaporized.

  The battle had begun.

  -33-

  51 Pegasi didn’t have any roads to speak of. There were clearings, paths through trees, and even simple bridges of a sort. But there were no actual roads for ground vehicles.

  I’d learned enough after repeated briefings to know that the Pegs usually flew in automated air cars, or used gravity-repelling ground vehicles, or simply walked on foot. So they didn’t really need what we called “roads” for travel.

  Accordingly, the enemy advance didn’t follow any obvious approach. They came toward us in a sweeping rush, more like a migratory herd on the run or a cavalry charge.

  As the alien sun rose, looking very like our own yellow-white star, the bright light flashed and gleamed from their armored bodies. I imagined that in centuries past the Earth’s legionaries had faced similar charges by armored horsemen or war elephants.

  The approaching wave of creatures was more like the latter. They were huge, and they ran with an odd, loping gait. It wasn’t a gallop exactly, it was more violent and surging than that. You could sense the powerful muscles under those metal plates and the swiveling turrets that rode their backs.

  These armored monsters had both cameras and fleshly eyes. The guns on their spinal ridges were guided by eyeballs, while camera lenses examined their surroundings and chose their best path.

  As they got closer, I saw broad, pounding feet encased in more metal. It was like being charged by a horde of steel-clad rhinos.

  Behind that first, massive wave worse things marched toward us. Two-legged walkers like the ones we’d seen at Hammonton strode quickly, there beam-cannons looking like beaks. I noticed they were tall enough—and I didn’t think it was an accident—to shoot right over the backs of their rhino-like front line.

  “Permission to fire, sir!” Sargon called out.

  “Hold!” Leeson shouted back.

  Leeson knew his shit when it came to timing a light artillery barrage, so I didn’t interfere. I turned to Harris, who had ordered his men to switch over their morph-rifles to long range mode.

  “Don’t,” I told him. “Stay with medium ranged assault.”

  He looked at me, and I could see his eyes were bloodshot. He hadn’t gotten much sleep since yesterday—no one had, unless you counted my twenty-nine minutes of nonexistence.

  “We’ve got a double-line of heavy troopers at the base of this hill,” Harris told me. “You really think they’re going to get past that?”

  “Yep.”

  Harris rubbed at his jaw for a few seconds, jutting it out in thought. I knew he was thinking about arguing with me. But then he roared at his men to switch their rifles back to assault mode. Confused, they hastened to comply.

  Forward of the trenches, lying on their bellies, my light troopers were steadily sniping now. Barton was running them smoothly, as usual. She had turned a rabble of recruits into functional soldiers on the way out here aboard Legate. Someday when I had the time, I’d have to study her training methods…

  “Barton!” I called out. “Fire at those bird things in back!”

  “On it, Centurion.”

  The snap-rifles paused, then began to crack and flash again.

  Zooming in with my helmet’s HUD, I started marking targets. Red triangles appeared on the heads of individuals I’d spotted that seemed particularly vulnerable. The troops naturally concentrated their fire on the marked enemy, and they began to go down.

  The star-falls were still sending beautiful arcs of death toward the approaching line—but they weren’t striking the rhino-things, or the storks—they were landing far away, over the folds of the nearest hills.

  “What in the hell are those blind fools aiming at?” Harris demanded. “The enemy is right here!”

  “Maybe there’s something else out there,” I said, “still inbound. Watch your own targets. They’re coming into range.”

  Leeson gave the word to fire at the same moment, and both our unit’s 88s sang their song of death together. A flood of radiation saturated the air over our heads. It was a glaring, sickly green and seemed to turn the air it passed through into a rippling mirage.

  The beams swept horizontally, consuming whatever they touched. The rhino front line was set ablaze—but they kept charging. They came at us exactly as if they weren’t roasting to death in their metal shells.


  Leeson shouted again, his voice cracking. The beams reversed and swept back the other way, igniting more of the aliens.

  Only after a second stroke of intense radiation did any of them stagger and tumble. Even when down, they kicked and struggled to fight on. I saw exposed bones in their feet and flapping skin that had half-turned to ash.

  The first two ranks were destroyed, but the rest made it to the croaking line of near-humans who stood their ground stalwartly in front of us. I felt proud to see their bravery.

  Sure, others might call them morons, twisted genetic freaks and worse—but I called them brothers. A century back, before all the intensive breeding programs of their Cephalopod masters, their ancestors had been born on Earth, the same as mine had.

  Lifting cannon-like gunpowder weapons, the heavy troopers released a volley of fire. The results were surprising—they inflicted nearly as much damage as our 88s had done.

  The explosive pellets they fired penetrated armor and blew apart the internal organs of the charging enemy—or maybe their circuitry, it was hard to tell. Hundreds of the enemy dropped and tumbled, but for every one that went down another leapt over the fallen gracefully, continuing the press right up to our foremost trench line.

  It was then, at that very moment, that the attackers drew close enough for me to recognize them. These aliens… they were the altered bodies of Peg civilians. They had to be.

  The original images I’d seen of the cat-like natives of this world, with arms in front and powerfully-built bodies behind… It had to be their bodies the aliens had bastardized with strange surgery. These rhinos weren’t rhinos at all, they were hybrids. Mixtures of machines and meat. Flesh and blood creatures that had been torn apart and reassembled in a new form with electronic brains connected to their nervous systems.

  My lip curled up. All of these monstrosities had to be destroyed. All of them.

  The rhino-like things had lost half their number by the time they hit the heavy-trooper trenches. I dared to hope they wouldn’t break through.

  Thousands of struggling forms met in the clash of battle. Swinging swords, the heavy troopers had dropped their rifles and drawn thick-bladed cutlasses. They didn’t fence with these weapons, they used them the way a madman might use a cleaver. They hacked without finesse, with berserk power driving their blades.