Armor World Read online

  Our troops were smaller and less armored than the enemy, but many of the rhinos were injured. It was a ghastly fight. A cloud of dust and smoke arose, soon obscuring the field.

  Sucking in a breath, I stood up in the trench and roared at my men.

  “Heavy platoon! Advance!”

  With that command, I climbed out of my safe hole in the ground and marched downhill. Startled, Harris fell in behind me. We marched to support the near-humans in their trenches, as we could no longer see well enough to shoot into the tangled mess below our position.

  “This is crazy, McGill!” Harris shouted. “Fucking crazy!”

  Graves buzzed in my ear a moment later. Had Harris complained to him? I hoped not, but I wouldn’t have put it past him.

  “McGill, why are you out of position? No one gave you the order to die—not yet.”

  “I get that, sir,” I shouted back. “But we can’t support the Blood Worlder troops with fire from the hilltop. We’re advancing to stop the enemy charge now, with everything we’ve got.”

  Graves was quiet for a moment. I knew he was examining the situation from my perspective using remote cameras and battle computers.

  “Carry on,” he said at last, and the connection dropped.

  I waved to Harris, who rushed over to me, sweating and breathing hard.

  “Are we pulling back, sir?” he asked.

  I pointed toward the lines of legionnaires on our flanks. We saw hundreds of other heavy Varus troops joining our charge, moving rapidly downslope to the meet the enemy.

  “Not quite. Press the attack.”

  Harris nodded dejectedly and faced the dust and smoke ahead. He took in a deep breath of his own, and then we plunged onward. A platoon of our Legion’s finest followed in our wake.

  -34-

  When we reached the Blood Worlder front lines, they were in a bad way. Blue-white smoke drifted everywhere accented by orange flame. A blacker smoke billowed up from some of the destroyed aliens that lay sizzling.

  That had to be the weirdest thing I’d seen yet on this planet, this world of armored beings. The alien constructs sometimes caught on fire, the way any damaged machine might do.

  But the strange part was what happened to the meat fused inside these evil machines. It began to cook, to sizzle, to smoke like a barbecue gone horribly wrong.

  Harris paused when we got to the trench line and flipped open his visor. He reached inside to mop his sweating face—but that was a mistake. One whiff of that frying alien meat, and he retched.

  “Pull it together, Adjunct!” I said, gripping his armored shoulder and giving him a shake.

  He gave me an unhappy glance, but he nodded. He slammed his visor shut again, and we marched on, plunging into the flowing smoke.

  The fighting was just ahead. As soon as we reached the forward trench line, we saw struggling figures. Most were grievously wounded. Heavy footmen from Blood World had hacked with their swords and fired point-blank into the bleeding, smoldering monsters that sought to tear them apart.

  These front line troops weren’t sophisticated. I guess they were akin to the converted citizens we’d had to blast to fragments back on Earth. But these guys were a lot bigger. The average Peg citizen was around eight hundred kilos in weight without any electronics or armor attached.

  My platoon of heavies waded into the fight. When we found living enemy constructs, we switched our morph-rifles into close-assault mode. We used grenade-launchers and plasma torches liberally. Often, it was hard to fire because the Blood Worlders were in the way, tackling the enemy hand-to-hand.

  In such cases, we extended our force-blades and killed the armored creatures with thrusts and cuts. There were cracks in the enemy armor, and we drove our weapons home to strike the muscles, electronics and soft vitals.

  “Centurion!” Harris shouted, grabbing me and turning me around.

  I almost slashed him—but I stopped myself.

  “McGill! Something else is coming!”

  There was a hint of fear in his eyes. I didn’t usually see that. Harris had witnessed things far more gruesome than these cyborg freaks.

  Following his gestures, I first heard rather than saw what he was talking about. A deep rumble shook the ground we were walking on.

  As a precaution, we both slid down into a trench. It was deep, dug for men a meter taller than we were.

  “You think that could be those bird-things?” Harris asked. “You think they’re charging us behind all that smoke?”

  I climbed up to get a view, grunting and working my elbows in the blood-soaked mud. Wiping at my faceplate, I scanned the battlefield.

  “I don’t see any bird-things,” I said. “I don’t see much movement at all except for those trees… Something is knocking the trees down… Over there, see?”

  The smoke had cleared somewhat. A few distant cheers went up as my men retook the trenches. The army of rhino-type creatures had been defeated.

  Blood Worlders who’d survived the onslaught were filling the trenches around us. They dragged behind them any of their brothers who were too wounded to walk, but they offered them no other aid. In their culture if you couldn’t recover on your own, you should die.

  They blinked at us in confusion, as if wondering what we were doing in their foxholes—but they didn’t ask any questions. They almost never did.

  In the meantime, the rumbling sounds only grew. The thick liquids puddled up in the trenches and shook like jelly due to the vibrations.

  Beginning to worry, I tried to contact Kivi first, to see what her drones had spotted. There was no response—her name was blinking red in my HUD. She’d caught a stray round at some point.

  Next, I reached out to Graves with my tapper. He was my immediate superior, and he should have a better perspective than I did. After a few tries, he finally answered my call.

  “McGill? Have they hit you yet?”

  “Uh… has what hit us, sir?”

  “Those giant tanks. They’re mowing right through the trees like grass. It’s too late to run now, just hunker down and let them roll over you. The stork-things following them should be easier game for infantry.”

  Alarmed, I relayed the message up and down the trench. As the Blood Worlders didn’t seem to respond, and I didn’t see their squid sub-centurion, I flipped up my visor and roared at them, using my voice.

  Choking smoke rolled into my face, but I didn’t care.

  “Get down! Everyone, get down in the trenches as flat as you can!”

  A few did it. I don’t know how many. My own troops were more with it, so they laid down first. Then, the grunting heavy footmen followed suit with bewildered expressions.

  That’s about when the rush of tanks hit us. They didn’t fire, they simply rolled their treads right over our positions. Each tank was bigger than a diesel truck and twice as wide.

  Big, steel arms like crane booms swung overhead of each treaded vehicle. The tanks had three arms each, and these limbs moved independently. Picking up soldiers, both human and near-human, they began a grim, methodical slaughter.

  Often, they simply plucked limbs and heads from the struggling forms. In other cases, they raised the victim into the air. That invariably resulted in a storm of beams firing, lancing through the body from a dozen angles. The stork-like things were right behind the tanks, and they were excitedly beaming any human they could get a bead on.

  In my case, a tank rolled up and over my trench. A Blood Worlder was crushed, his ribs crackling and his skull popping like a melon. He was too big, too badly placed to survive the weight of those massive metal treads.

  Harris was on my right, and he didn’t fare any better. He tried to scramble away, he even made it a dozen meters before one of those long, segmented arms with a three-clawed hand at the end caught him.

  Up into the air he went, and the stork-things burned him greedily, marching around in clacking circles as they struggled and competed to get a shot.

  There I was, on my back, pinne
d by mud and bodies, all of which was being compressed by the terrific weight of the enemy vehicle.

  As I couldn’t do much while lying on my back, and I was pretty certain there was no surviving this particular situation, I lit up one of my force-blades. One arm was free, and I saw the tank’s metallic belly overhead. Here and there hairs sprouted out of it—but it was mostly metal.

  Thrusting my force-blade deeply into the enemy, I was pleased when a gush of—something—splattered my faceplate. Was it piss? Blood? Something worse?

  I couldn’t tell, but a yellowy, thick liquid was running down out of the tank’s gashed belly. I was reminded of corn oil, or olive oil…

  The tank lurched away from my trench after that. I got the feeling it had sensed the damage to its undercarriage and decided to move on. The huge shadow retreated, and smoky daylight swept over me. Struggling up into a sitting position, I was quickly surrounded by the bird-machines.

  I’d never been this close-up to so many of these freaks. They were animal-like, curious. They walked around, staring down at me with camera eyes and those deadly, plasma-tubes that resembled giant beaks.

  They didn’t fire right off. That was their mistake. Maybe they were hoping I’d get up and try to run. Maybe that made the game more fun for them—but running had never been my plan.

  Each man in Legion Varus is issued a single grav-grenade. I used mine now, arming it and throwing it directly upward.

  The storks tracked the glowing object curiously, their long snouts rising to follow it. A few beams slashed the air—but they missed.

  Then, the grenade went off. I was blasted flat on my back again. I was hurt bad. As a man who’s been on a first name basis with the angel of death for decades, I could tell I was a goner.

  But the half-dozen stork-things that had been hunting me weren’t in good shape either. They staggered, falling into one another. They were blinded, it seemed.

  A crowd of others were attracted to this anomaly. These didn’t fool around. Maybe they didn’t want to know what I’d done to their stunned brothers.

  They beamed me from a dozen angles, burning me alive in my armor at the bottom of that stinking trench. I was struck three times, then six more, and I was glad when it was finally over.

  -35-

  “Score?” a clipped, high-pitched male voice asked.

  “He’s a seven-point-nine.”

  “I’ll call it an eight. Get him off my table.”

  Hands roughly hustled me into a sitting position.

  Sometimes when I woke up in the morning, I felt refreshed and full of life—but today wasn’t one of those times.

  Groaning, I rolled onto my feet and almost slipped and fell onto the floor. Catching myself with wide-flung arms, my wobbly legs barely held me.

  “What the hell?” I croaked. “Did you guys use spoiled meat to print me out?”

  “Recycled cells are as good as fresh ones,” the bio told me without a glance. “Don’t go offing yourself just because you find out you’ve got a bad back, Centurion. This is the best you’re going to get today—we have a long backlog.”

  I remembered the battle then, in a rush.

  “What happened down there? Did we wipe?”

  “Not exactly. The lifters pulled out half the legion.”

  “Varus? Half of Varus?”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “What about the Blood Worlder legion?”

  The bio looked at me crossly. “I don’t know about those apes. Ask Tribune Armel.”

  Becoming angry myself, I told him I would do just that. Then I put on some clothes and staggered out onto Blue Deck.

  Orderlies watched me, stopping their private conversations to stare. It was their job to make sure I got out of their universe—which we called Blue Deck on every ship—without causing any undue trouble.

  I might have messed with them, but I figured the snotty bio was right. I wasn’t going to get any better materials if I got myself killed again. When fresh supplies were running low, complaining about it wasn’t going to change anything.

  Making my way to the elevators, I was faced with a choice. I could go down to the modules and check in on my troops—but most of them were still dead. I could see their status on my tapper.

  The other option was to take a little field trip up to Gold Deck. I chose the latter direction and controlled the elevator with a flick of one finger.

  Up I went. When I reached the end of the line, I was on Gold Deck.

  “Centurion?” asked an inquisitive guard. “Do you have business up here, sir?”

  “I sure do. I’m going to see Tribune Armel.”

  He eyed me for a moment, then consulted his tapper.

  “His office is right down the hall, sir—in the back.”

  I walked off, slightly surprised. The guard hadn’t demanded anything special—like orders. Maybe that was because I hadn’t demanded to see Graves, or Turov. Legionnaires with murder on their minds tended to go straight up the chain of command.

  Likewise, I was a centurion now. We had free run of the place most of the time. Hell, if I ever made primus, I’d end up flying a desk on Gold Deck myself, just like old Winslade did on every campaign.

  Getting past Armel’s secretary wasn’t difficult. She was Centurion Leeza, a longtime confident of Armel’s. She didn’t really like me, but we did go way back together, having first met on Tech World.

  “My how the years do look good on you, Centurion!” I told her with a grin.

  She twisted her lips into a frown in return.

  “I was killed this morning,” she said sourly. “What do you want, McGill?”

  “Why, to see your lovely face again, that’s all!”

  Leeza wasn’t an idiot. She narrowed her eyes in my direction. “Just go in—he’ll see you now. But if you shoot him or something, I’ll kill you myself.”

  “I’ll take that as a promise.”

  Figuring I should take the invitation I’d been offered without negotiating, I walked into Armel’s office and found him stripped to the waist and toweling off.

  “Uh… hello, Tribune.”

  “Ah, McGill! Do you know why I let you come in here?”

  “Uh… no sir.”

  “Because it’s been ages since we last met and planned a disastrous military operation together. I simply had to hear whatever cock-and-bull story you wished to annoy me with today.”

  “Glad to see you, too. Listen… about that battle. We lost, right?”

  “Heh… quel idiot! Did you seriously come here to request a briefing? What is the matter with pestering Graves? Does he blame you in some way? I would not be amazed to learn this was the truth.”

  “No, no sir. That’s not it at all. I—I just wanted to know what happened to the Blood Worlders. To your legion, sir.”

  He blinked twice in surprise.

  “They did exactly what they were supposed to do: they died face down in the mud, that’s what.”

  “Really sir? No survivors?”

  He shrugged. “There might have been a cohort of stragglers that managed to shove themselves aboard the lifters before they took off. Don’t worry about it. We’re getting more troops from Earth right now. Thousands of fresh apes are marching through the gateway posts onto this ship as we speak. Not even an army of bio specialists with revival machines churning night and day can replace human troops that fast.”

  “Well… that’s not very encouraging. They fought hard down there. They fought and died hard. They deserve a burial, or something.”

  Armel snorted. “A ceremony? For the dead? What century is this, McGill?”

  “One where Blood Worlder troops get permed all the time. Do you really think we can keep on getting them slaughtered while we recycle our own lives right in front of them?”

  Armel laughed and opened a cupboard. He pulled out a crystal bottle and two glasses. “Come, McGill, you must drink with me now.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because y
ou’ve made me happy on this dark day. I can’t believe I’ve found a fool who’s more worried about my own lost troops than I am.”

  It wasn’t much to drink over, but I accepted his expensive brandy and gulped while he sipped. He watched me over the rim of his glass.

  “You died in the trenches, correct?” he asked.

  “Yup. Right under a flock of those stork-things.”

  “Ah then… ” he said. “You never encountered the true enemy, just the underlings that came first to skirmish.”

  My mouth fell open and hung there. I hate when it does that.

  “Uh… the real enemy? You mean those armored rhino-things and the storks with beamers for beaks—they weren’t the worst?”

  Armel laughed. “Not at all. They were merely an hors d’oeuvre. The true enemy came after that wave. A battalion of vast tanks. Vehicles so large and deadly they swept away our legions without a care.”

  He looked away, as if haunted by imagery.

  “Actually, I did see a few of them. They overran us at the end. I cut the belly of one of them open.”

  “Did you now! Well done.”

  Curious, I reached to his desk. He had an open after-action report on the desktop. I made a spinning motion with my finger and a video began to play.

  “I’ll be damned…” I said, watching in horror and fascination.

  The vids were taken by a flying drone, that much was clear. The battle looked a lot different when you could see the whole thing.

  As I watched, a column of vast vehicles swept down over the hills. The tanks were so big their treads took down trees the way a mower takes down a field of weeds. At the first trench line, where I’d so recently died in the mud, they overran the battleground. They crushed humans, near-humans and converted Pegs with equal disdain.

  Pressing toward the Varus lines higher up the hill, they shrugged off blasts from our 88s, but when a star-fall hit one it was destroyed.

  Each tank had small missiles on its back that launched now and then, destroying artillery pieces and clumps of our troops. Turrets swiveled and blasted our trench lines, destroying our troops and causing a mass retreat. In the end, the tanks overran our lines, and the lifters began to flee.