Роберт Бюттнер - Orphan's Journey

The Leader of the Troop I would ride with reined up his mount alongside me, and held up an empty ammunition sack. “Sir, what do we do with these?” His armored shoulders slumped, and his wobblehead panted.

“Follow me. Do what I do.”

There wasn’t time to explain the plan that had grown from Howard’s hunches, much less time to train Scouts, so exhausted they could barely stay in their saddles, to execute that plan.

More battles have been lost by failure to seize opportunity than have ever been won by caution.

Howard expected the Slugs to start their human laborers moving Stones out of the bins and into the transport ship as soon as the humans had enough visible light to work.

Bassin estimated that it would take an hour, start to finish, for the slaves to shift the Stone volume from the bins into the transport. Once the Stones were loaded into the transport, our opportunity window would close.

I checked my rifle for the fourth time, checked my ’Puter, and chinned my visor display to Jeeb’s overhead of the vast battle advancing slowly up the valley. Green bars showed Casus’s army, drawn up opposite the red bars of the Slug defending units.

Two hundred thousand men and four hundred thousand maggots boiled in parallel lines, separated from each other by a mile, and waited for dawn.

Since we had left the main body, Casus had defied logistics by force of will, pushing the Slugs back to within thirty miles of us.

I had coordinated by radio, through Ord, what we needed from Casus. His troops and animals had to be dead on their feet, but in a few minutes he would challenge every one of them to throw everything into one more assault toward us. If we failed, they would fail. If we all failed, mankind would forever after exist on this planet only as naked slaves.

My mouth went dry.

Fast, improvised initiatives had throughout history won battles — and wars. But too many “brilliant” initiatives had proven to be almost brilliant instead. Lee hurled Pickett’s division against the Union Center at Gettysburg, and his mistake doomed the Confederacy. The Ardennes Offensive nearly expelled the Allies from Europe, but when it failed, Germany’s defense collapsed.

Thump.

The first Ordnance Rifle emplaced above and behind us fired. Seconds later, the rest of the battery rumbled.

Six shells screamed by above the trees that hid us, and thundered, not into the Troll, nor into the humans massed around it, but into the Slug perimeter to our front.

I swallowed and shook my head. We weren’t going to blow up the Troll, or the transport, and kill those thousands of innocents. But we had better not lose the battle and this world on that gamble.

I checked Jeeb’s overhead. Down the valley, Casus’s troops responded to our guns’ distant rumble, and charged across the mile that separated them from the Slugs.

After three minutes, the guns behind us fell silent, their ammunition expended destroying the Slugs to our front.

The Troop leader next to me raised his rifle, and turned to his Scouts. “Forward!”

We galloped through the perimeter breach before the Slugs could react. Six hundred more Scout wobbleheads followed us, before mag rounds began falling on our column.

I spurred my wobblehead forward, as the lead Troop that I rode with crossed the open space toward the glowing red Stone bins.

Bewildered slaves scattered, but no Slugs advanced to meet us. Howard’s Spooks had estimated that Cavorite killed a Slug in thirty seconds from five hundred yards. The little maggots kept their distance, as we had hoped.

Now that we had gotten inside their lines, the maggots could turn their guns inward to potshot us, but they couldn’t advance on us, without killing themselves by Cavorite exposure. Individual Slug warriors weren’t afraid to die. If the ganglions in them thought independently at all, they probably thought — correctly — that since the overall organism survived they weren’t even dying. But individual warriors were smart enough to avoid dying without accomplishing anything.

I reined up alongside a bin, dismounted, then scooped glowing Stones into the empty ammunition bag I carried, until I could barely heft it across my saddle.

My visor display showed the green bars of Casus’s army racing forward, now.

As we expected, once the Slugs’ main army realized we were in their rear and threatening the Troll, their formations had to fall back to reinforce against our attack. The Slugs beat that retreat so fast that Casus’s troops could barely advance fast enough to maintain contact with them.

Once two Troops of Scouts riding behind me had loaded their bags with Stones, I led them at a gallop southwest, down the valley, toward the Slugs retreating from Casus.

As I approached the Slugs’ perimeter this time, I didn’t bother shooting. I chucked a couple Stones left and right. Slugs scattered or died.

Thirty minutes later, our Scouts had sprinkled their Stones in a belt that spanned the valley, wall-to-wall. The retreating Slugs either had to turn, fight Casus’s army, and die, or keep retreating into the Stone barrier belt— and die.

Slugs aren’t much for individual initiative, but a few made for the forests at the valley’s edge. Casus’s cavalry cut them down before they made two hundred yards.

The Slug remnants squeezed between us and Casus could no longer win the war. I wheeled my duckbill, and stared back at the thirty-five-thousand-year-old mountain fortress that was the Troll. The defending Slugs that remained inside it couldn’t win the war, but they would fight to the last maggot. Worse, if they blew themselves and the Troll up, they would take the Scouts and the prisoners with it.

I chinned my magnification. Bassin’s Sappers had blown a breach in the Troll’s hull at ground level, and it yawned big enough to swallow an airliner. But I could see Slugs boiling out of the breach, mag rifles spitting. Beyond them, the Scouts that were supposed to have charged through the breach and secured the Troll before the Slugs could blow it, hunkered, sheltering behind wobblehead carcasses that had been shot out from under them. One of the pinned troops wore old, Eternad crimsons. Howard was attached to those Scouts, to guide them through the Troll. I intercommed, “Owl, this is Eagle, over.”

“This is Owl.”

Good. Howard was still in military mind-set. “Owl, you need to get those people moving before the Slugs blow your objective to rutabagas.”

“You know how it is, Eagle. They send out warriors faster than we can send out bullets to kill them, Eagle. We can’t go back. We can’t go forward.”

“You were supposed to use Stones to drive the Slugs back.”

“The Troop with the Stones never got here.”

I scanned the battlefield. Five hundred yards from Howard and the pinned-down Scouts lay a bloody jumble of wobbleheads and Scouts, ripped apart by Slug Heavy rounds. Even in daylight I saw red Cavorite glow from Stones saddlebagged among the corpses.

I spun my wobblehead, and gathered a half dozen mounted Scouts.

In thirty seconds, we reached the Stone bags. Two minutes later, we began lobbing them, grenade-style, toward the Troll’s hull breach.

Slug defensive fire slacked, but the pinned-down Scouts didn’t wait for it to stop before they were up, and charging forward. As they ran, dodging dead and dying Slugs, the Scouts scooped up thrown Stones, to throw again and clear their advance.

The first man through the breach carried his rifle in one hand, and swung his free arm forward, in the follow-me gesture of the infantry. He wore Eternad crimson.

By mid morning, Jeeb’s display showed no red bars of organized Slug units. Only scattered Slugs meandered around in the mile-wide belt that remained between our onrushing line and the Cavorite barrier.