John Steakley - Armor

Involuntarily, Felix glanced upward. “Why don’t you just tell the ship to stop Transit?”

“What ship is that?”

“Huh?” He turned and stared at her faceless helmet.

“The Terra was hit. We haven’t heard from her in… not in a long while, anyway.”

“But the Transit….”

“Those are the jeep carriers. Automated. Robot pilots.”

He stood there for a second or two before saying: “Damn,”

“Uh-huh,” replied the scout. “Damn. Well. I have a place I’m supposed to be. We’ve a rendezvous of sorts.” She read dials. “It’s not far.”

She led the way through the maze, stopping often to check her bearings. Twice he thought he heard her mumble to herself, but said nothing to prompt her. They saw no one else for several minutes.

Suddenly she stopped.

“They’ve figured it out,” she said, half to herself. “They’ve stopped shelling.”

Felix listened, nodded. “They’ll be looking for us.”

“Yeah. Then we fight again. And then we move again. Then we fight.”

“You’ve moved before?”

“Twice. It delays things a little, not much.”

She turned and faced him then, shoving out a gloved hand.

“I’m Forest,” she said. “Third Scout, Forward Group One.”

“Felix,” he said, returning the handshake.

“You want to hear it all? The whole deal? We won’t have time later. Or maybe you don’t care?”

He found himself smiling. “Maybe not. But give it to me anyway.”

“Right.” said Forest, leading off again through the maze. “First of all, it was easy.”

Ten thousand warriors had made simultaneous Drop on the “wrist.” They drove due north toward the Knuckle, arriving at the edge of the maze well within estimated time limits. They quickly arranged themselves within the classic semicircular battlefield pattern and waited for A, B, and C Assault teams to arrive. They had excellent communication with the Terra, good morale and, at that point, nothing to report.

An hour later, the Terra stopped transmitting abruptly, in mid-sentence. All efforts to reopen communications were to no avail. No one was really worried though. The weather, someone suggested. Two hours later, however, and all were getting awfully nervous about being alone. The idea of losing contact had, frankly, never occurred to anyone.

Nervously, all eyes turned to the Knuckle.

And, on cue, it opened…

The ants came in waves that were perhaps half as wide as the Warrior emplacements. They came right at the center of the humans’ strength. Because of clever positioning, the ants in the front ranks were clearly visible long before they reached the trenches. Also, only one or two in ten actually carried the blasters, which were of dubious value anyway considering the length of time they must remain centered on a single target.

So it was just what the human commanders could have wished for.

The first wave was literally obliterated without a single human life being lost. Likewise the second wave and the third.

The commanders could find no evidence that the ants were trying to flank them, so they drew in most of the forces from each end of the emplacement, leaving only scouts at the edges.

The fourth wave came and went the way of the others. Then the fifth died as well and the sixth and the seventh and by now everyone was having a helluva good time killing ants. It was easy. More, it was fun.

The ants stopped coming for a while and everyone cheered until they remembered that they still couldn’t talk to the ship. Until B and C teams straggled in carrying bodies and missing many more.

The officers got together and gave the warriors make-work to keep them from thinking too much and it worked for a while until there simply wasn’t anything else for them to do and they got a chance to sit down and look at what they had done.

“That’s when I knew,” said Forest. “That’s when a lot of people saw it.”

It was the bodies of the ants. There were thousands of them. Thousands and thousands and thousands. There were more than the entire loaded complement, not just of the Terra, but of the entire wing. There were too many. Too damn many.

The next wave was more than a wave. It was a solid mass. The first attacks had been only scouting missions, they realized, as they watched the choking, boiling rush swarm toward them. Just scouts.

They called it the first assault. During its half-hour length, two thousand warriors died. One out of every five humans.

“What’s incredible,” said Forest, “was that we held at all.”

But they did hold. Against that assault and against the next and the next. But by then all was a mass of warfare and death and smoke and blistered ants and ruptured plassteel and some officer got smart and called for troops to move back and dig in at another spot.

About then the mortars started falling, coming from the Knuckle itself and it got so bad that they moved again almost immediately.

“We weren’t just retreating. We were running. But then we found a real good spot and dug in a little better than ever before. We had the best of the best left, you know. And plenty of power left. And we blew big holes in ’em then. Big, big, holes.

“But, dammit, we were still getting chewed. We should have just run like hell and I told ’em so. But they wouldn’t listen to me. Those idiot officers… Felix, they still didn’t know what was going on. Not even then. They hadn’t seen the fighting from up front like the rest of us. They still thought the Knuckle was a goddamn mountain fort.”

“Isn’t it?” asked Felix, puzzled.

“Felix,” she said slowly, stopping and looking at him. “That is no fort. It isn’t even a mountain.”

“Then what is it?”

“It’s a hive.”

The warriors hastily erecting the fortification couldn’t have numbered much more than twenty-five hundred.

“Where are the rest?” asked Felix.

“I guess this is it. Except for some stragglers.”

“This couldn’t…. You mean you lost three-fourths of your entire force?” Felix couldn’t believe it.

“Well, we had about twice this before the Transit idiocy. But the Hammer did a bad job on us. Hold on here, Felix. I’ll see if I can find someone for you to report to.”

She trotted off down the lines. Felix watched a squad of warriors demolishing large sections of the sandy ridges on either end of the barricade to inhibit encirclement. Another group was busy leveling the maze for about fifty meters straight out in front, to provide a flat killing area for the enemy to cross before reaching them. It looked, he thought, like they would be in a good spot in any normal encounter. But this was not normal. The ants were not…. He shook his head briefly to clear his mind of the image of those waves and waves. He wondered how it had affected those around him. He watched them go about their duties in what seemed to be a trancelike haze.

Forest reappeared. “Can’t find anybody much. Colonel said you’re with me for now. Right?”

“Sure.”

She went to a stack of blazers surrounded by piles of assorted bits of equipment. She picked out two, handed him one.

“This blazer’s almost empty.”

“Yeah,” she replied calmly. “I gave you the one with the juice in it. Clubs, Felix. Welcome to the interstellar Stone Age.”

“I thought we had plenty of power.”

“Not for blazers they tell me. Okay—we’re the backup team for this area.” She waved an arm at an area behind the barricade perhaps twenty meters wide. “The procedure is to let breakthroughs alone. The line warriors ignore them. We, that’s you and me, are supposed to get them as they come through. Go for the head first. If you can’t reach that, try for the thorax.”