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  "What about sober and a virgin?" said Chip to the tail end of the burrowing Fal, as he lifted a beam to allow Nym to get in to the next section. The only human they'd seen so far-the lieutenant-hadn't been alive. But Chip hadn't been looking for him anyway.

  "You're as bad as these other useless rowdy, lecherous drunks," said Melene, one of the three surviving rat-girls. She was also digging. It sounded as if she approved of lecherous drunks.

  Chip managed a decent grin. He wasn't really in the mood for this, but he'd learned how to get along with the rats. "Just a lot more expensive to get drunk so that you can have your wicked way with me, Mel."

  This provoked a snort-of amusement from the rats and disgust from the bats. "I' faith, when it comes to drinking, Fat Fal will give you a run for your money," said Doll, reputed to be the baddest rat-girl in the army. She would know.

  "Fal?" demanded Chip. "Run for my money? Run! Fal! Come on! Be reasonable. He gets exhausted picking his teeth."

  "Listen…" snapped one of the bats. "They're coming. Quiet!"

  There was silence. Chip's less-than-cybershrew- or batborg-keen ears could hear nothing. Yet obviously, the others could. After a few seconds it came, at first a faint whisper, then growing and growing. Arthropod clicking. The sound of myriad upon myriad Maggot clawfeet, passing right above them. If they made any noise now, the Maggot-diggers would come through the roof. All they could do was wait, knowing that their comrades might possibly still be alive under the debris. Knowing too that, with each passing moment, the chances for any buried friends diminished.

  Eric Flint

  Rats, Bats amp; Vats

  Chapter 2:

  Really under enemy attack.

  THE TRAMP-SCRITCH-TRAMP went on and on for hours. They were plainly right underneath a big Magh' push.

  Trapped.

  Chip could do nothing but sit in the darkness, conserving his torch power pack. He thought of sun and light and air. He couldn't help but think of the dead. Friends. Comrades-in-arms. And…

  Dermott. Damn!

  Here he was, as far as he knew the last surviving human in this hole. If he had to be honest with himself, Chip knew that they had no chance of getting out of here. It was a thought you pushed aside or you cracked up. He'd had to push aside the memory of death and the hope of survival so many times. After all, he'd been a conscript for seven months now. It felt like seven years. In this war he was a combat veteran. A conscript's lifespan in the front lines was usually less than three weeks.

  Buddies were close, and yet… you kept your distance. You didn't want to get too close. Still, this time… he'd like to see another live human face. Dermott's, especially, but any human would be better than none. If push came to shove, Chip would even settle for a goddamn officer. Even if the alien soft-cyber enhanced rats and bats, with all their goofy attitudes and ideas, were still more his kind of folk than those sons-of-Shareholders were, he'd still like to see a living human again…

  Hell, he might as well wish for one with an hourglass figure too. And a few beers. A steak as thick as both his thumbs… Huh. He was getting more like one of the damn rats by the day.

  The air was hot and stale in this hole. But at least the noises from above had begun to change.

  "They're building." The low bat-whisper was the first thing besides Maggot susurration and his own quiet breathing and heartbeat that Chip had heard for hours now. He recognized Bronstein's voice easily enough. Despite the generic similarity of all the voices produced by the synthesizers, each rat and bat still managed to maintain a distinctive tone.

  Chip ground his teeth. Maggot tunnels above them! Maggot tunnels could be miles wide and five hundred yards high. "Look, we've got to get out of here. We're gonna run out of air and suffocate soon anyway."

  "We'd be foine if it wasn't for the primate using two-thirds of the oxygen," grumbled a bat. That was Behan, surly as usual. "Still, we should be able to start diggin' out now. Those builder-digger Maggots are really stupid. When I was in that mole in Operation Zemlya, we popped out right next to them. All they did was stand around and get butchered."

  "When who starts digging?" sneered Fal. "You damn flyboys can't dig." The rat heaved his corpulent form upright. "Who does all the work around here, and why do we, hey, flyboy glamour-puss?"

  "Work! 'Tis ignorant of the concept you rats are!" snapped the big male bat. He called himself Eamon Jugash… something or other. Chip couldn't remember. Or see the point. Bats didn't really have decent jugs, after all.

  But that was bats for you. Bats always chose mile-long pretentious names for themselves, to replace their official Society-issued numbers. What Chip principally remembered about this one was that Big Dermott had said that that particular bat was trouble. He would tell her The realization hit him like a sledgehammer. He wasn't going to be telling Dermott anything. She was dead for sure, by now.

  He was a bit shocked at how hard that knowledge hit him. It wasn't as if Dermott had had a dazzling personality or been any kind of a beauty queen. Not too bright, really, with a broad Vat face on a big workhorse body. But a nice girl all the same. A very nice girl. A girl with a dream… One more indebted conscript the Company wouldn't be collecting from.

  Still, he had to make sure. Maybe He got up and began digging into the rubble.

  "You're not going to get out that way, Connolly," said Siobhan.

  "I'm looking for someone," he replied stubbornly.

  "Nobody would still be alive."

  "I know. But I can't just leave her. There's a chance."

  "Dermott's dead," said the bat quietly. "A scorp got her, in the middle of cave-in. I saw."

  Chip swallowed. He supposed that it had been an open secret. A private life in the trenches was a wild dream. "Are you sure?"

  "Sure as breath. It was quick and painless, Connolly."

  That was a lie. Scorp poison wasn't. But Siobhan had seen her die. That was plain enough. Poor kid. He thrust his hands deep into his pockets, and swore quietly to himself.

  He sighed, and started to haul clods away behind the digging rats. Every single time you said, "Don't get involved, or, if you're gonna get involved, just keep it physical." But you always ended up exchanging dreams. Dermott had wanted a farm. Huh. A Vat-born indentured girl who wanted a farm! Fat chance. Farm laborer was the closest vatbrats could get. Well. The kid had bought one. And the Company wouldn't be screwing her any more, either. Yep, the only way out of the Shareholders' clutches… die. And then, rumor had it, they'd bill your clone for the burial charges.

  "Responsible socialism," the New Fabian Society Shareholders called the system they'd set up on the colony planet of Harmony And Reason. HAR-or, as vatbrats called it, Har-de-har-har. When they weren't just calling it the Company Town.

  Chip had been born here-grown here, rather-in one of the New Fabian Society's genetic production plants. Grown in a Company Vat, raised in a Company Nursery, and educated in a Company School. His "parents" were shreds of cryo-preserved tissue some long-dead dreamers had sent off on a slowship to this new "Utopia" among the stars.

  Utopia-ha! Even the Shareholders, so far as Chip could tell, didn't believe that crap. At least, he'd heard them whine enough about Harmony And Reason in the haute cuisine restaurant where he'd worked before the war. Not that he'd had much opportunity to listen. He'd been an apprentice sous-chef after finishing Company school, and he hadn't had a lot to do with the clientele.

  Still, he'd noticed that the Shareholders seemed to be especially grumpy about the sunlight. To Chip, the sunlight was not too blue, nor too hot. But the older Shareholders weren't local Vat-born clone kids like him. No, they'd been wealthy adults back on Old Earth-philanthropists, they called themselves-and had come along in cryo-suspension. The windows of Chez Henri-Pierre had been specially tinted to yellow the sunlight for them. According to them Earth light had been sweeter and better…

  A rude voice interrupted his musing.

  "Pull your finger out and move the damn st
uff out of the way, Connolly."

  Chip shook himself. He'd been falling asleep, he realized. Air.. .

  "Dig us an air hole, Pistol."

  "So that we can breath Maggot pong? And they can smell us?"

  "We need oxygen, you…"

  "Better make us some human oxygen out of your own air hole, you muddy rascal! I feel tired and I've got a headache. I don't feel like digging."

  "Intercranial pressure because of vasodilation in the brain from oxygen deprivation," said Doc. "The lethargy is caused by raised CO2 levels."

  For a moment, Chip was startled by the assurance in the bespectacled rat's voice. But then he reminded himself that Doc had proven, more than once, that he was an excellent medic. At least, when he wasn't droning on about epistemology and ontology and the whichness-of-what.

  Chip unlimbered the Solingen. It seemed an effort. Like bothering with perfectly scalloping that last potato of the hundreds… Like that, this had to be done. "Dig straight up, Pistol, or I'll shove this up your ass and ruin your sex life." He noticed that his outstretched arm was trembling.

  It wasn't a long dig. Moments later the rat broke through. The Maggot-tunnel air was cool, sweet and fresh by comparison to the stuff in their hole. The one eyed rat took long whiffling-nosed sniffs of it. "So okay, Connolly, you damned dunghill cur. My head already feels better. Maybe I won't piss in your next beer. Even Maggot-air smells good compared to the stuff in here. But don't ever threaten me with that poniard of yours again."

  That was one villainous old rat. There were times to back off, and this was one of them. "You can empty your bladder into the next beer I buy, if you like. It'll be yours. I owe it to you, I reckon. Lack of air was making me silly."

  The one-eyed rat was mollified. In a manner of speaking. "I'm a whiskey drinker, you skinny blue-bottle rogue. And I like triples. And I never pee in my own drinks."

  "Give a rat an inch…" Chip smiled.

  "And he'll think you're shafting him," concluded Pistol, with a suitable gesture.

  "Will you two be getting out of the way so that we can all have a breath of air?" Eamon grumbled.

  Eric Flint

  Rats, Bats amp; Vats

  Chapter 3:

  Behind enemy lines.

  SLOWLY, THEY CONTINUED to dig a narrow passage, under the hardpan of what was plainly an ever-growing Maggotway. The rats were fine excavators, but the main problem was where to put the uncompacted material they were digging out. And a rat hole was going to be too small for Chip, although the bats could manage it.

  A quiet council was held. "You guys had better dig out. We'd better block that air hole, too. Maggots will smell us out, otherwise. I'll break out and take my chances when you've been gone a while." Chip was nobody's hero-by definition-since he was still a live grunt. Heroes got dead. And the first thing a grunt learned was "don't volunteer." But there didn't seem much point in getting them all killed. They had a tiny chance. He didn't.

  "The Maggots up there are building faster than we can dig," grumbled Fal. "My old claws are nearly worn out."

  He puffed out his chest. Well, his belly. "Anyway, we'd never leave a comrade in distress." The plump rat even managed to get the words out without choking.

  "Never?" asked Bronstein, her voice dry. Rats might be natural Maggot-killers, but they weren't known for suicidal courage.

  "Well, hardly ever!" chirped Melene.

  "And certainly not one who owes us drinks," added Pistol.

  "We've still got a load of satchel-charges between us," mused Bronstein. "We should all go up. We can move a damned sight faster through their tunnels than we can with a fat old rat like you grubbing. And if they try and stop us, we can blow down the very heavens on them."

  "The human's right for once," hissed Eamon. "What cause do we have to die for this Company-lackey primate? His kind wanted this war. Leave him."

  "Damn you, bat!" snarled Chip. "The effing Company grew me in a vat too. Just like you. I'm an indebted conscript. Also just like you. Get that straight, squashed pig-face. And nobody wants this war, not even the goddamn Company, but if we don't fight, we're all Maggot food. Call me a Company-lackey again and I'll dice you into bat tartare."

  The big bat bared his long sharp fangs at Chip and then studiously ignored him.

  "He'll be killed on his own, to be sure, Eamon," said Siobhan timidly. She was the smaller of the two female bats, and didn't have Bronstein's self-assurance.

  "Indade." Again, Eamon flashed his teeth. "And so will we all be, waiting for him. Is it not fair that one of these humans that put us all in bondage repay us with a distraction? I say, bat-comrades-in-arms, that we put it to the vote!"

  "To Lucifer's privy with you and your vote," grunted Nym. "I'm going up." Nym was a veritable giant among rats, fully sixteen inches high. He seldom spoke, but when he did the other rats paid attention. Even the bats-even the belligerent Eamon-were careful not to aggravate Nym.

  The one exception was Doc. The pedant-rat eyed Nym beadily and said: "Dolt. You forget the overriding precedence of epistemology."

  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.