Eric Flint: Rats, Bats and Vats

"Shee… yit! That was nearly my head," panted Chip. He and the rat both scrambled clear of the falling Maggot.

Long insectivore teeth gleamed. "You owe me a beer, Connolly. Make it two. I've got a nice bit of tail I'd like to share it with."

"Bullshit! You owe me, Fal-"

The air boomed and fragments ricocheted off Chip's slowshield. Great! thought Chip, with relief. One of the bat-bombardiers must have blown the Maggot access tunnel. Now at least they only had to deal with what was already inside the bunker. Chip stumbled over something in the dust and darkness. Fell. Landed hard.

"Get your sorry whoreson ass offa my tail," chittered a feminine voice in the darkness. "You useless effing bread-chipper!" Chip scrambled to his feet. He'd rather fight Maggots than Phylla. That was one mean rat-girl!

Then, with a slow creaking groan, the main roofbeam fell in. Either the demolition charge or the Maggot tunnel must have undermined its support. Earth and roofing material descended, in a tons-heavy avalanche. Chip grabbed the rat-girl and dived for the far wall.

In the creaking darkness a rat voice griped, "Malmsey-nosed whoremasters. My pack is somewhere under that lot."

The air was so full of dust, you could shovel the stuff. Chip coughed and felt about for his dislodged headlight. Rats and bats could manage in the total darkness. The bats had their sonar and the rats-built from a mix of elephant shrew, shrew and rat genes-could just about read by scent, and had keen hearing to boot. Humans still needed implanted infrared lenses and headlights. Maggots might have keen hearing, feelers and scent sensors, but were plainly blind to infrared. It was one small advantage.

"Anyone got a headlight there?" Chip asked softly. A Maggot could nail him so fast now. He still had his knife… but it was no use poking blindly at Maggots. He knew he had to cut precisely, and that he'd only have one chance. He wouldn't have said "no thanks" to his standard issue bangstick, an assegai with a cartridge set into the blade. It wasn't a great weapon, but it allowed some margin of error. It was a lot better than the rest of the issue crap: a stupid little ice axe thing and a trench knife you couldn't slice baloney with.

The slowship which had settled the planet of Harmony And Reason had taken the colonists out of the network of industries which twenty-second century technology needed to support its complexity. So, except for the clone units on the ship, the colonists were back at self-sustaining tech levels. From the manufacturing point of view, that meant nineteenth to early twentieth century. Which meant no mono-molecular edged knives.

Chip had once tried to tell an officer-a Shareholder, naturally-why the thing was effing useless compared to his own. In typical officer fashion the jerk had told him to shut up, and demanded to know where his regulation trench knife was. After all, what could a veteran grunt know about fighting Maggots? Much less than some still-wet-behind-the-ears lieutenant, of course.

Still, the bangsticks worked. When you pushed them into the right bit of Maggot, that is. He really wouldn't have minded having his. It must be buried back there somewhere…

He tried again. "Anyone got a light?"

Nobody replied from the darkness. But at least there were no Maggot scritch-scritch noises either.

"Who else is in here?" he asked, daring to speak slightly louder. He strained to hear one particular voice, hoping…

He'd seen the wall come down on Dermott. The slowshield would have protected her from the debris, but had she managed to get out before the roof came down?

"I' faith. I am, and so is someone who is lying on me."

"Sorry… Doll? Is that you?" It was the same rat voice which had been bemoaning its missing pack.

"Yes 'tis I, you fat swasher. I should have known by the familiar weight that it was you, Fal."

Chip cleared his throat, trying to clear away the constricting fear. "Let's have a roll call, guys."

"Piss off. Who do you think you are?" said another male-rat voice. Chip could tell, even in the dark. The male rats always had their vocal synthesizers adjusted to a low pitch, in the attempt to sound like real he-rats.

"I'm Connolly, rat. I'm a human, see. That means you take my orders."

"You've got more chance of falling pregnant, Connolly," groused the same voice. "You're not a whoreson officer, you're just a vatbrat."

Chip ground his teeth. There hadn't been a human reply yet. "Rat, I will pull your tail off, and then shove it down your throat until it comes out of your ass, if you give me any more lip. Now, who else is in here?"

There came a chorus of voices:

"BombardierBat Siobhan Illich-Hill."

"BombardierBat Longfang O'Niel."

"BombardierBat Cuchulain Behan."

As always, Chip thought the sound of an Irish accent coming out of their voice synthesizers was ludicrous, but the bats insisted on it.

"It is delusions of grandeur I think the human has," said another bat-Irish voice, leaden with resentment.

"Do you now, Eamon? Well, I think it is you who have the delusions. This is Senior BombardierBat Michaela Bronstein, Connolly."

Chip was relieved to hear Bronstein's voice. In some ways, he thought Michaela was even crazier than the other bats, but at least he'd always been able to get along with her.

"And, seeing as you want to know, I'm Melene, gorgeous." A rat-girl voice.

"Phylla. You flung me here." That rat-girl didn't sound too charmed about it. But Phylla was usually in a foul mood.

"Doll Tearsheet-at your service."

"Not right now, Doll." Fat Falstaff sounded more cheerful already.

"Shut up, Fal. I know you're here. Anybody else?" Chip hoped for a human voice…

"Nym."

"Pistol."

"Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel."

Despite the name, that was a rat too. "Doc," as everybody else called him, was the platoon's medic.

Rats. Rats and bats. Chip felt for his torch again. Maybe he could see her. Then a bat voice said, "Try the other side of you, indade."

The bat-Irish idiom, as always, grated on Chip's nerves. "Why can't you just say `indeed,' dammit?" he muttered, as he began feeling around. "Stupid friggin' affectation…"

The voice, still as heavily accented as ever, clarified the location: "About a foot from your knee."

He felt there. Encountered the hard roundness of his torch. Felt for the switch. On. There was no light, but he'd done enough globe changes in total darkness to manage to fix that, a lot faster than soldiers had once been able to fieldstrip their rifles. The light stabbed out through the hanging dust.

No Maggots. In the narrow uncaved-in section of what had been their bunker, a handful of rats and a cluster of bats pressed against the sandbag-wall. There were no other human survivors with them. Already one plump rat was scrabbling aside pieces of debris.

"Gotta find my pack. It's got my grog in it!" hissed fat Fal, digging frantically. "Damn near a full bottle too."

Two of the other rats hastily got up to join him.

"Oh, aye, that's right," said a bat sarcastically. O'Niel, that was. "Bring the rest of the roof down on all of us in your mad search for the daemon drink."

Fal, the paunchy rat, simply grubbed harder. "It's dig or die sober," he said with grim humor. "Besides, I might find someone. Maybe a grateful bit of tail."

"Yep. Only one thing worse than dying sober. That would be to die a virgin," said his villainous one-eyed companion, Pistol, nimbly jumping clear of a cascade of earth.

"Ha, Pistol, as if your puissant pike ever found a rat maiden that had despaired of winning a rat's affection…"

"What we observe here is the moral quandary inherent in the empiricist approach to-"

"Oh, put a sock in it, Doc," Pistol said.