Ben Bova: Orion Among the Stars

I took a deep breath, considering all that. Then I said, “So the army allows sex as a form of reward, then.”

For an instant I thought she was going to slap me. Her eyes blazed with fury. “Where are you from? The army allows sex because without it we don’t fight as well. The sex drive is intimately entangled with human aggression and human protectiveness—both of them—at the deepest genetic levels. Don’t you understand that? Don’t you know anything?”

“Guess I don’t,” I admitted.

“By damn, I hope you know more about fighting than you do about the army.”

“I know about fighting,” I said softly.

“Do you?”

I nodded, then got to my feet again and left her standing in the middle of her tent, looking more troubled than angry. I knew about fighting, from the Ice Age battles against the Neanderthals to the sweeping conquests of the Mongol hordes. From the war against Set’s dinosaurs and intelligent reptilians to the sieges of Troy and Jericho.

I knew about fighting. But what did I know about leading a hundred soldiers in a war that spanned the galaxy, a nexus in space-time that would decide the existence of the continuum?

I began to find out.

Outside Frede’s medical tent, most of my troopers were busy assembling the transceiver that would be the hub of our base on planet Lunga. I could see from the number of modules they had already uncrated that we would have to knock down some of the trees to make room for the assembly. Two of the sergeants already had a team working on that, on the other side of what I now considered to be our base camp.

One squad was setting up the antimissile lasers, the only heavy weaponry that had been sent down with us.

“Nice of the big brass to send this down with us,” one of the troopers was saying as she connected cables from the power pack to the computer that directed the lasers.

“Yeah, sure,” groused the man working alongside her. “They don’t want their nice shiny transceiver bombed into a mushroom cloud.”

“Well, the lasers protect us, too, you know.”

“Yeah, sure. As long as we’re close to the transceiver we’ll be safe from nuclear missiles.”

“That’s something, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, sure. The brass loves us. They stay up nights worrying about our health and safety.”

The young woman laughed.

Other troopers were setting up bubble tents and stacking our supplies. All of them had shed their armor in the morning warmth and were working in their fatigues, which were rapidly becoming stained with sweat. The insects that had plagued us during the night had disappeared with the dappled sunlight filtering through the canopy of leaves high above us. The little camp sounded busy, plenty of grunts and grumbles and swearing. In the background I could hear birds trilling and chirping. Then the cracking, rushing roar of a giant tree coming down. A thunderous crash. The ground shuddered and everything went quiet. But only for a moment. The birds started in again, the soldiers returned to their chores.

I walked past the construction crews, out toward the perimeter where Sergeant Manfred was in charge of the security detail. He was in his mottled green armor, helmet on, speaking by radio to the soldiers on guard through the woods.

“Anything out there?” I asked him. I myself wore only my fatigues, although I had my comm helmet on and I kept a pistol strapped to my hip. I remembered a time when I wore a dagger on my thigh, out of sight beneath my clothes. I missed its comforting pressure.

“There’s something bigger than a tree lemur moving out at the edge of our sensor range,” Manfred said, his voice low and hard.

“Intelligence claims there’s nothing bigger than tree lemurs on the planet.”

“Those swamp things were bigger.”

“But here on dry land?”

“Could be enemy scouts,” he said flatly.

“Maybe we should dig in, prepare to fight off an attack.”

“Does Intelligence know how many of these Skorpis are on the planet?”

“They claim only a small unit, guarding a construction team.”

Manfred grunted.

I agreed with him. Intelligence had not inspired me with confidence, so far on this mission. “I’ll get a squad to start digging in as soon as some heavy equipment comes through the transceiver. In the meantime, you—”

The blast knocked me off my feet, sent me tumbling a dozen meters. Clods of dirt and debris pattered down on me; acrid smoke blurred my vision. I could hear other explosions, and the sharp crackling sound of laser weapons.

Manfred slithered on his belly toward me. “You okay, sir?”

“Yes!” There was blood on my hand, but that was nothing. “Get your men back toward the base.”

“Right!”

I lay there on my belly and squinted out into the woods as I yanked my pistol from its holster. Scarcely any shrubbery to hide behind in this parklike forest, but whole divisions of troops could be sheltered behind those massive trees. I wormed my way backward, looking for a depression in the ground that might offer a modicum of protection.

A laser beam singed past me, red as blood. I fired back before realizing that I should turn off the visible adjunct to the beam. The red light made it easy to see where your beam was hitting, but it also made it easy for the enemy to see where it was coming from. Tracers work both ways, I remembered from some ancient military manual.

Sure enough, a flurry of beams lanced out toward me. My senses went into overdrive as they always did in battle, slowing the world around me, but that was of little use against light-beam weapons. One of the laser bolts puffed dirt scant centimeters from my face; my eyes stung and I tasted dirt in my mouth. Another burned my shoulder. I hunkered down flatter, trying to disappear into the ground, spitting pebbles and blinking dust from my eyes.

A trio of grenades were arcing toward me. With my senses in overdrive I saw them wafting lazily through the air like little black grooved toy balloons. I popped each of them with my pistol while they were still far enough away for their explosions to harmlessly pepper the empty ground with shrapnel. Then a rocket grenade whooshed out of the woods; I had barely enough time to hit it.

I inched backward a bit more, still peering into the trees to find a trace of the enemy. Nothing. They were devilishly good at this. I heard a few muted explosions thudding far behind me, then silence. Minutes dragged by. Birds began to sing again, insects to chirrup.

I lay flat, staring into the trees, straining to catch some sight of the enemy, some trace of movement. Nothing. I carefully clicked off the visible tracer beam of my pistol, then fired into the general area where the grenades had come from. Still nothing. I held the beam steady on a bit of shrubbery until it burst into flame, but still no sign of movement, no sight of the enemy.

“Captain?” I heard in my earphones. My second-in-command, Lieutenant Quint.

“Go ahead, Quint,” I whispered into my helmet mike.

“Are you all right, sir?”

“Hit in the shoulder. A few scratches. Nothing serious.”

“They seem to have gone, sir.”

I ordered the security detail to report in, by the numbers. Four of my troopers had been killed, six more wounded. No further reports of enemy activity.

I waited for nearly an hour. Nothing. The rest of the hundred had dropped their construction chores, of course, and grabbed their weapons to come out and reinforce our perimeter. But the enemy had vanished as suddenly as they had struck.

Finally we trudged back into the still-unfinished camp. I doubled the perimeter guard while Lieutenant Frede looked after the wounded and a burial detail froze the dead. Frede seemed puzzled as she applied protein gel to my burned shoulder.