Eric Flint: Rats, Bats and Vats

Nym stared back at him. For some odd reason, Doc never irritated Nym the way he did everyone else.

"Huh?" Chip looked at him, puzzled.

Doc sniffed. "In layman's terms-" He pointed at the roof with a stubby rat digit. "The enemy is coming."

There was instant silence. Then someone said: "Fighters, too, from the sound of 'em. Lots of Maggot-scorps. They must have smelled us.. ."

"Out of the way." Bronstein waddled forward, moving as clumsily as the bats always did on the ground. She carried one of the bombardier-bats' small satchel-charges in her wing-claws. "I'll blow the roof and we'll run."

"Give it," said Pistol. "I'll shove it up the air hole. I can move faster than you."

"Okay. I'll put the timer on seven seconds. When she blows, be ready to run. Chip, you take that bag over there. There's half a platoon's worth of spare bat-mines in it. We might need them."

The debris was still falling when the surviving platoon members-one human, five bats, and seven rats-scrambled out of the hole.

They found themselves inside a roofed-over but plainly incomplete Magh' tunnel. It was cathedral high and filled with a tracery of mud beams at angles that were… wrong to the human eye. Maggots didn't work in straight lines or precise angles. The material resembled adobe, but the Maggot version was a lot stronger.

" 'Ware Maggots!" In the pallid greenish light of Maggot lumifungus on the walls, Chip could see a column of the scorpion-digger Magh' skittering closer down the passage. The bats were already flapping upwards in the high tunnel. At least they'd have a chance, now that they had flying room.

"… Off to Dublin in the green! Our bayonets a-gleamin' in the sun!" shrieked Eamon, diving on the Maggot-scorp column. He wasn't going to run… or fly from the enemy. The big male bat might be dead set on treating humans like shit, but he liked to fight, especially against the odds.

Well, Chip knew bats were like that. Crazy. After brewing up the cyber-enhanced rats, the genetic engineers at the New Fabian Society's labs had tried for more heroic and idealistic helpers for mankind's war when the bats' soft-cyber units were downloaded. They had put Irish revolutionary songs and old "Wobbly" tunes into the bats' vocabulary memory units.

Truth to tell, the bats were more idealistic and courageous than the rats. A lot more. But, in Chip's opinion, they were even more off-the-wall. And they were prone to endless political theorizing and disputation.

The rats claimed it came from hanging upside down and getting too much blood to the head-not to mention abstaining from drink and having sex only once a year or so. Chip thought the problem might be simpler. The bats didn't know if their enemies were the humans or the Maggots. (Neither did the rats, he suspected-but, ratlike, they didn't worry much about anything beyond the next moment.)

As always, however, the Maggots solved the problem. Magh' had no doubt at all who their enemies were-everybody else. Chip and the rats ran… well, like rats. There had to be some way out of here, surely?

Eventually they bolted down a twisting side tunnel, and then rushed back out again, nearly falling over each other in their haste. One of the biggest Maggots that Chip had ever seen had been coming the other way. Chip'd seen a lot of varieties… he thought he'd seen them all, but this was a new one. He reckoned the grunts 'ud call this one "Maggot-mutha."

"This way!" called Bronstein, as they boiled out of the tunnel mouth. Fluttering ahead of them, she led them into another narrow opening off the main Maggot-way. This time there was no huge Maggot in it. An explosion behind them briefly hardened their slowshields.

"That was one smart bat-move, Bronstein," groused Chip, in the aftermath. The bat had dropped the archway of Magh' adobe behind them with a well-placed satchel-limpet mine. Chip looked around the tiny irregular-walled chamber that was left to them. "This is a goddamn dead end! We're trapped in here!"

The bat's huge leaf-ears twitched. She rumpled her gargoyle face at him, flashing white fangs. "If you were any more microcephalic we could use your head for a pin, Connolly. On the other side of that wall I can hear outside noises. Is it a lack of interest that you have in going there?"

For an answer the rats began digging. Digging like fury. Even the tubby Fal moved with the startling speed that made the rats such powerful, if reluctant, allies in this war.

"Be using your tiny heads," snapped one of the other bats. Behan, surly as always. "We need a shot pattern, not a rabbit warren."

On the other side of the fallen archway, Chip could hear the Maggots starting to dig too.

When they broke through and spilled into the sunlight, Chip practically whooped from sheer delight. Ha! Not even a whining Shareholder could moan about how wonderful the sun looked today. A beautiful blue pinpoint in the sky! Still, he was careful not to look at it directly.

There'd been a time, not ten minutes back, when Chip had thought he'd never see daylight again. The first Maggot claws had been pushing through the debris when the bats had pronounced the shot holes deep enough.

Now, they were out and running. Maggot-scorps and diggers were child's play to avoid out here in this rough and blasted terrain. Quickly, Chip examined the area.

Once this must have been prime farmland. The war had shattered and torn it. No blade of green life showed in the pockmarked and cratered landscape. The Maggots were steadily turning it into Maggot-tunnel land. Chip and his twelve companions had broken out between the walls of two of the massive red tunnel-mounds which the Maggots erected everywhere in conquered territory.

"Can't we take a breather?" panted fat Fal. "Methinks we've got to have at least half a mile's start on 'em."

"To be sure. Rest and die, you fat slacker," said Eamon. He wrinkled the folds of his ugly face in that inimitable bat manner of sneering. "You do know you're going the wrong way?"

"Hell's teeth, maltworm!" snarled Fal. "You flutter-fellows can try going the other way. Half the Maggots in Maggotdom are back there. Besides, look." The fat rat pointed. His stubby little "forefinger" was a blunt digit. Rats could manipulate things with their "hands," but despite the best efforts of the genetic engineers their forepaws were still much less adept than human hands.

The horizon, beyond the walls of the tunnel-mounds, flickered. "We're inside the Maggot force field," hissed Fal. "You know what happens when your slowshield intersects that."

Indeed, they did. You fried. It was the Magh's inviolate defense against human-allied attacks. Every time the Magh' pushed forward, they'd seal their gains like this. For minutes the screen would be down while the Magh' pushed forward. Then the Magh' would be safe again.

Humans and their genetically engineered allies had been forced into World-War-I-style trench warfare by this. Worse, it was just defensive warfare. And for all their efforts, they had never succeeded in doing more than slowing the pace of the Magh' advance.

Still, it could have been worse, Chip admitted. The alien Korozhet had brought the human colonists advance warning of the impending Magh' invasion. And they'd helped defend the capital city of George Bernard Shaw against the first Maggot probes. Even if their FTL ship could not help the humans further-due, according to the Korozhet, to malfunctioning engines-at least they'd brought warning to the colony.

More than that, actually. The Korozhet also had slowshields, and the wondrous soft-cyber implants which had uplifted the rats and bats. The genetic engineers of the colony had "built" the rats and latterly the bats, to flesh out the ranks of the pitifully small human army. Instant genetic uplift was beyond them-but the implants solved that. Yes, the Korozhet had been glad to provide that advanced technology to the colonists-for a price.