Ben Bova: Orion Among the Stars

“It’s you or me,” I said aloud, thumbing the pistol up to half power and slicing off the reaching tentacle. The creature made a growling sound and waved the severed end of its tentacle in the air, spewing dark blood.

Looking down again, I saw its face: a collection of clacking mandibles and glittering eyes, dozens of them. I fired at the eyes, raising the power of my pistol slowly, astounded that the beast—whatever it was—took the punishment for what seemed like an eternity to me. Just as I began to wonder if the laser beam was having any effect on it at all, it gave a howling shriek and dropped away from me.

Suddenly freed of its weight, I shot up even higher into the night sky. I gulped for breath and then started back down.

A full-scale battle was going on below me. I could see laser flashes and hear my troopers yelling and calling back and forth.

“The damned rocks are alive!”

“And hungry! ”

“And friggin’ hard to kill!”

The entire swamp was filled with carnivorous creatures thrashing, slashing, grabbing at our bodies as if we had been sent by heaven to feed them. My troopers splashed through the soupy water, shooting at the swamp creatures while trying not to hit one another.

And our equipment packs, the components of the transceiver and all our supplies, had sunk out of sight to the bottom of the swamp.

“Full power on the pistols,” I called to them on the command frequency. “Whoever’s got two hands free, unlimber a rifle and go after them.”

Panting, battered, frightened, we finally fought free and made our way into the trees. The ground was firmer there and free of things that wanted to eat us. At least, it seemed that way.

We sprawled on the solid ground, massive trees rising in the darkness all around us, and caught our breaths.

“What the hell were they?”

“Think they come up onto dry land?” asked a worried voice in the darkness.

“They must have been figments of our imaginations,” one of the women said, sourly. “The briefing tapes specifically told us that no threatening carnivores have been identified on Lunga.”

“The highest form of living creature on planet Lunga,” quoted another soldier from the tapes, “is a harmless furry tree-dwelling mammalian about the size of a tree lemur.”

“So much for the scientific survey of this planet.”

“So much for Intelligence.”

“And the friggin’ scouts.”

“There’s no intelligence in Intelligence.”

“When’s the last time you saw one of those bald guys away from his computer?”

Another of the women grumbled, “But they’re so damnably smart about it. You notice they said no carnivores have been identified on the planet.”

“Well, I identified a few. My goddamned armor’s punched right through. Look at it!”

His chest plate was cracked where one of the tentacled claws had scratched across it. I looked down at my leg, surprised to see blood on my armor. My own, I realized. I had automatically shut down my pain receptors and clamped the blood vessels tight while I was struggling with the creature that had fastened itself to my leg.

“Sergeant,” I called, “set up a perimeter and establish guards. I’m going to raise the cargo packs out of that swamp and float them over here. We’ll rest here for one hour.”

“Yessir,” said Manfred.

I dialed the comm frequency of my helmet radio and called for the other squads. One by one they reported in, each of them telling a tale of swamp monsters. Two of the troopers had been killed on one squad. Several others injured.

I called up the map of the area and studied it in the view on my visor.

“We will rendezvous at point A-Six,” I told the other squad leaders, picking a spot that seemed high and dry on the contour map. “In two hours. Any questions?”

“One of my men is too banged up to be of any help to us,” said a lieutenant. “Can we call for an evacuation lift?”

“Negative,” I said. “We bring our wounded with us. And our dead, too.”

While most of the rest of my squad grabbed a precious few minutes of sleep, I went to the edge of the swamp and worked the controls on my belt in an attempt to raise our equipment packs from the bottom of the bog.

One by one, slowly, reluctantly, they came up with big sucking sounds, like someone pulling his boots out of clinging mud. The flight packs worked even under water. I only hoped that their packaging was watertight. Dripping mud and slime, they hovered in the dark night air in response to my command. In the view of my visor’s sensors they looked hot red against an eerie yellow-green background.

One of the swamp creatures snaked a tentacle to the nearest of the packs, touched it, decided it was not food and sank back into the ooze. They live in the water, I told myself. They won’t come out of the swamp and up onto dry land. I fervently hoped so.

Then I wondered, If the planetary survey did not detect that this clearing was a swamp, if the scouts did not know that there are dangerous carnivores down here, how accurate is Intelligence’s estimate of the enemy’s strength and capabilities? It was not a pleasant rumination.

Sergeant Manfred rotated the perimeter guard every twenty minutes, giving each trooper about forty minutes’ rest. He did not seem to sleep much. I had been built to need hardly any sleep at all. Had he been given the same strength? Could he control every part of his body consciously, even the involuntary nervous system, as I can? Could he slow down his perception of time when the adrenaline flowed, so that in battle his enemies seemed to move in slow motion? Could any of them?

I wondered about that until I saw him finally grab a catnap after the third set of guards relieved the second shift. No, Manfred needs sleep as much as the rest of them. He does not have my talents. None of them do. They are simply ordinary men and women, bred from cloned cells and trained to be nothing but soldiers.

After an hour the whole squad assembled and we glided through the forest toward the rendezvous point I had selected, the bulky equipment packs bobbing behind us. The trek was pure hell. It was hot and sweaty inside our suits, but when some of the troopers took off their armor, biting insects swarmed all over them. They put the armor back on, but the insects stayed inside their clothing, feasting on their flesh. It would have been funny, watching them trying to scratch themselves inside their armor, if they had not been so miserable.

The wounded were even worse off. As they floated in their flight packs, they moaned endlessly. One of the sergeants bawled them out in a vicious, half-whispered snarl:

“You whining bunch of mutts, you’d think your guts had been pulled out the way you’re screeching. What are you, troopers or sniveling crybabies?”

“But Sarge,” I heard one of the troopers plead, “it’s like it’s on fire.”

“I’ve got four decorations for wounds, Sarge,” another said, “but this is killing me.”

Every centimeter of the way, as we groped through the dark forest, with the insects buzzing in angry clouds about our heads, the wounded troopers cried and begged for something to stop their pain.

Then we ran into the squad led by Lieutenant Frede, the unit’s medical officer. Her wounded were whimpering and groaning just as badly as my squad’s.

“I can’t really examine them on the move, sir,” she said to me. “Can we stop for ten minutes? And may I use a light to see their wounds properly?”

The enemy was supposed to be halfway around the planet. But what if there were other nasty surprises in this forest, like the swamp things that had tried to eat us? I glided among the trees in silence for a few moments, weighing the possibilities. Frede hovered at my side.