Mary Gentle - Grunts

“It’s true, sir! It’s true! They’re going down! We’ve done it!”

The great orc said grimly, “Now let’s put the real barrage down. Tech-Captain Ugarit!”

Barashkukor, amazed, stood up and pushed his helmet back on his head. His long ears sprang upright. “No, sir, wait .”

The small orc scrabbled down, lost his grip, and fell heavily on his commanding officer’s boots. He got to his feet, pointing excitedly towards the plain. “Sir, what’s that?”

Far out on the plain, visible to technology-assisted eyes, a unit of thirty or forty Bugs clustered on high ground. Burning trees and buildings marked the hill as one of the outlying hamlets on the road from Ferenzia to the north. The yellow fog swirled about the foot of the rise, clinging to the low-lying earth below the one or two hovels left standing.

None of the Bugs were firing their weapons.

One Bug, taller than the rest, its exoskeleton a gleaming ebony, held something in its front claws. As Supreme Commander Ashnak stared through his field glasses, he recognised John Stryker’s pole and white pennant.

The Bug raised its arms and frantically waved the white flag.

“Cheeky bugger !” the orc major yelped. “Land the next barrage smack on that position, sir. Of all the nerve—offering to surrender to orcs .”

Bio-tech-Captain Ugarit yelled, “Artillery group, depress elevation—”

Ashnak brought his fist down on the top of Ugarit’s head. The skinny orc folded like a dropped brick. Ashnak rumbled, “All artillery units on stand-by. Repeat, on stand-by. No one fires without my order.”

“But sir !” Barashkukor protested.

Supreme Commander Ashnak surveyed the battlefield outside Ferenzia, the white flag, and the clouds of nerve gas even now dissolving on the slight easterly breeze.

He picked up the radio handset.

“All units—cease fire! Say again: cease fire . Commissar Razitshakra, I’m taking a unit out to grid reference ohseven-three nine-eight-zero. I’m going to accept the enemy’s surrender.”

The yellow-white Class G star seared down through the smoke of burning trees and native buildings. Two rotor-driven flying machines rested on the scorched fields. A cordon of indigenous life-forms surrounded the blitzed village on the hill, their curiously separable weapons pointed at the Jassik soldiers.

Hive Commander Kah-Sissh regarded the hot, smelly, fleshly body of the nearest indigenous life-form—so suitable for incubating eggs—and clicked his mandibles in regret. His salivating hiss sounded above the surrussation of the wounded and the rotors of the natives’ flying machines:

“I am Hive Commander Kah-Sissh.”

“Supreme Commander Ashnak,” the life-form growled. “Pleased to make your acquaintance.”

Fifty metres away a Jassik soldier rolled, black carapace shredding in the clinging yellow gas. Exoskeletal limbs sprouted, malformed, desperately attempted to re-grow. She finally dissolved into a metallic black sludge, self-repair mechanisms run wild.

Hive Commander Kah-Sissh spat, “It is our dishonour to surrender ourselves to you, indigenous life-form!”

The native scratched with taloned manipulators at the division of its bifurcated trunk.

“That’s ‘orc’ to you.” Its tusked head lifted, staring up at the Jassik Hive Commander, and it jerked one of its opposable thumbs at the only native hovel left standing in the area. “Inside!”

The translation device that the other native had carried burned against Kah-Sissh’s thorax. He understood. The novelty of studying these creatures other than to kill them momentarily took his interest.

Hive Commander Kah-Sissh looked up at the three-story building, set like an island here where two major roads crossed: north-south and east-west. A creaking wooden panel suspended on the frontage bore a two-dimensional image—one of the native beasts of burden, portrayed as rearing in an anatomically unlikely manner.

“I consent.” Hive Commander Kah-Sissh hissed an order. Thirty exoskeletal Jassik heels clicked down onto the dirt. The command escort’s lines straightened up smartly, their carapaced heads jutting forward in a uniform position, odorous slime dripping down and eating into the soil at their feet. Kah-Sissh’s thorax expanded with a desperate pride.

“Battlemaster! Flightmaster! To me!”

Two of the largest Jassik stepped out, black metal harnesses glittering on their articulated thoraxes, disruptor and blaster power cables growing from their backs. The raised marks grown into the chitin of their shoulders marked them as high-ranking officers, suitable to accompany Kah-Sissh into disgrace.

“Awright, awright!” The native life-form did something to its dead-metal weapon that made it click. “I’m not running a goddamn party here. Get your Bug asses inside there, sharp!”

The Battlemaster and Flightmaster followed Kah-Sissh into the low-beamed structure. The Jassik Hive Commander picked his way distastefully through the overturned chairs, tables, and broken glass of what was obviously a shell-battered civilian hostelry.

“This will suffice for the Immolation of Disgrace,” Kah-Sissh announced, seating himself in the middle of the floor and gazing down at the fleshy bipeds.

“Not in this here inn, you don’t!” a portly native of the Man variety announced, bustling out from behind the long bench that stretched the length of the room. “‘Scuse me, master orc, but are these…‘visitors’ with you?”

Kah-Sissh watched Supreme Commander Ashnak draw himself up to his full height and glare round the interior of the inn. “This is where I’m holding our top-secret, highly confidential peace negotiations. Any objections?”

There was a clink of glasses from seats in a niche by the chimney that Kah-Sissh took to be the local heating-source. Several much smaller natives, the curly hair on their pedal extremities grizzled and grey, raised button-black eyes to the orc.

“Holding peace negotiations, is it?” one remarked.

“‘Oo’s stopping you, boy?” another commented. “So long as us halflings gets a quiet drink, we doesn’t care. Does we, Walter?”

“That us don’t, Matthew. That us don’t. Got better things to do than listen to orcs.” The more elderly of the halflings grumbled, sinking its mouth into a tankard. “By the Light! but it’s getting hard to find a good pint, what with the war an’ all. I recall as how you used to get a good pint at the Dog and Leggit—”

Hive Commander Kah-Sissh tapped the translation device hanging from his thorax, and despite himself queried: “The Dog and Leggit?”

“Ar,” the elderly halfling, Walter, replied. “Inn over at Bremetys, that were. Called that on account of you threw up over the dog and then you legged it.”

Kah-Sissh eventually decoded the small natives’ hissing expirations as amusement.

“Cider was better in the Dragon’s Nest,” the third halfling drinker remarked, from a seat at the back of the snug. “Whatever ’appened to the Dragon’s Nest?”

“‘Undred and fifty-five millimetre, six rounds of,” Walter remarked dolefully. “Drink ain’t never been the same since this ’ere danged fighting .”

The portly Man bustled across the inn floor and bowed to the orc commander, his gaze sliding sideways to Kah-Sissh. “If you gentlesirs will wait just one moment, I’ll set you up a table. Dick! Tom! Drat it, where have those lads gone?”

Kah-Sissh watched as the portly innkeeper stomped into the back of the building. His keen hearing caught the Man’s muttering: