The Rats, the Bats and the Ugly trtbav-2 Read online

  "There's not much left there. All right, soldiers. If they want something from there, it's our job to stop them. I'll want Alpha company, Sergeant. See they're in the cars in two minutes. And I'll want those 'sappers' and their supply of explosives."

  "Fitzhugh! You can't go," protested a colonel, who had been part of the trial panel. "We need you here, man."

  Fitz shook his head. "This command center is up and running. This is stuff you can all do as well as I can. Most of you have more experience at it, in fact. With respect, fighting is something I can do better than all of you. Come on, Ariel. Let's roll."

  ***

  Fifteen minutes later, they were surveying the two alien hovercraft that were slowly coming down the street. The aliens were plainly checking for resistance on their route. The second hovercraft had two captive children on the aft deck. On the foredeck, huge aliens with enormous horns were operating what was plainly some form of scanner. Inside the transparent dome, Fitz could see the prickly forms of their enemy.

  He and Ariel crawled back, before they came into range.

  "The Benmore building," said Fitz curtly, to the driver of his commandeered vehicle.

  They raced along the back-streets. Two minutes later Fitz's "sappers"-a pair of demolition contractors-were setting charges. His troops were doing a hasty door-to-door check for any remaining occupants of the plush apartment block next to the canal.

  By the time the two alien hovercraft came in sight, Fitz's makeshift troops were well back. Whatever sort of scanner the aliens were using would have to penetrate three buildings and an earth berm to detect them. One spotter remained on the roof. The rest were in the vehicles ready to race in… or away.

  They were armed with a mixture of issue bangsticks for the few slowshield-wearing military personnel, and an assortment of firearms and knives and hammers for the rest. Fitz had heard that a hammer had killed the Korozhet in the scorpiary. He wished desperately that he had some more front-line troops, but those were seldom posted back to the capital. He had several maintenance units, two boot-camps' worth of raw recruits, a lot of supply clerks and JAG officers, the medical corps-who had taken over civilian evacuation-a signals unit, and a hundred or so men who had been on pass in the city. He'd used these as stiffening in the units they'd formed with the townspeople.

  The new units were as often as not "officered" by Vats. Certainly all the NCOs were Vats. But the class distinction had gone by the board now that they were fighting for their lives.

  What he'd really wanted was Van Klomp and his paratroopers. But their camp was abandoned. Van Klomp would be around somewhere. But he hadn't stayed in a known possible target-showing more brains than most of the units, whose officers had kept them sitting on their hands. A sweep through Military HQ had gathered a further five officers-recent appointees, as well as a fairly large supply of clerks. Apparently the General Staff, having received assurances from the Korozhet, had left them behind as there wasn't sufficient transport.

  "Count of three," said the observer from the rooftop. His orders were to try and drop it on the lead hovercraft and the nose of the second. The prisoners were probably going to be killed by the Korozhet. They might be killed by the debris, but Fitz still didn't want to risk dropping the building on them. Demolition is not that exact a science.

  "NOW!"

  Inside the landspeeder the explosions were muffled. The dust ahead was still rising when Fitz and his soldiers got there. Dust was going up, and bits of the luxury apartments were still coming down. They were out of their vehicles and running in, firing small-arms for some form of cover.

  The second Korozhet craft was still moving. As they got to the deck, it lurched. One of the privates was cutting the two children loose, as Fitz took down his first Korozhet at close quarters.

  Then his muscles spasmed terribly and he felt himself helplessly arc over backwards into the rubble.

  He was conscious, able to hear and see, still breathing. And paralyzed. Fitz could see a orange-spined prickle-ball with what was unmistakably a hand-weapon.

  It said something.

  Ariel was standing on his chest. She started forward. Just a pace.

  Then she bared her teeth.

  "NO!" she hissed between those teeth. "Mine. Mine."

  So the Korozhet shot her. A brief dart of red light.

  Fitz, unable to move, felt her fall. And felt her lifeblood stream onto his chest. The little pawhands clung convulsively onto his shirt-pocket. And then released.

  The Korozhet spined down, with one of its horned alien henchmen. The Korozhet spine-suckers plucked up Ariel. The horned alien began to lift Fitz in its clumsy forepaws. Suddenly the creature jerked, and dropped him face down on the rubble.

  Fitz couldn't move. Face down, he couldn't even see. He could hear the shooting, though. It sounded like an entire barrage. He lay there, grieving. He had three last Cointreau-centered liqueur chocolates in that top pocket, that he'd been saving for Ariel.

  He was not too sure how much later someone turned him over. He was not sure he cared. Not even when he realized that it was Van Klomp's big ugly face looking down on him.

  ***

  It was almost two hours later that Fitz began to recover some movement. After that he had a couple of wild, almost epileptic muscle spasms, and found that he could at least begin to sit up. He was weak, and wretched.

  Van Klomp came into the aid station.

  "Boeta, I thought you were dead. I should have known it was too good to be true."

  "Ariel's dead, Bobby. She tried to protect me. Stood over my body. And the bastards killed her. I even couldn't move to help her." Fitz knew there was heartbreak in his voice. But Bobby Van Klomp was more than a friend. He was more of a father than his own father had ever been.

  "Oh, hell's teeth. I'm sorry, Fitzy. She loved you, that mad rat of yours."

  "She loved me enough to stand and defend me, when her soft-cyber was programmed to make her obey the Korozhet. I think that's why they shot her. But I wish they'd at least left me her body."

  "Fitzy… I don't know what to say, boykie. All I can say is your lot did a hell of a lot better ambush than we had prepared on the other side of the canal. You made them pay a very high price for her. You got two kids free. One's got a concussion and the other a broken leg, but they're alive and free. You killed twenty-seven and destroyed one of their hovercraft-and you only lost three of yours."

  "Only thanks to your lot getting there. I wish I'd known where the hell you were."

  "I moved my boys into the assault course grounds, except for the ones in that first chopper those bastards shot down. They're dug in there. Then we set up a sort of 'combined arms' group-the new recruits without slowshields and with as much firepower as we could manage to scavenge, the vets with bangsticks and explosives-and went and scouted Webb Fields. We dropped a few smoke-rounds on the crowd, in order to chase them out of that trap. But then we got our mortars taken out, and we've been scouting for an opportunity since."

  Fitz's stood up. "Be ready for lots of opportunity. I plan to kill every single stinking Pricklepuss on this planet before I'm done. I'll give Ariel a funeral pyre worthy of a goddess."

  Van Klomp smiled crookedly. "I don't think the rats have 'goddesses,' Fitzy."

  "They do now."

  Eric Flint

  The Rats, the Bats amp; the Ugly

  Chapter 52

  Eric Flint

  The Rats, the Bats amp; the Ugly

  The ship of slaves and the new slave compounds, outside.

  Yetteth had long since lost track of the time that he'd been a prisoner. In all that time he'd never been outside the ship. Very few of the thousands of Korozhet on the ship ever left the vessel, and, from what he could gather, slaves never did.

  That made sense, of course. Until the Magh'-clients had finished clearing away the humans and the new world was open for Korozhet settlement-or, at least, until all subterfuge had been abandoned-the Korozhet didn't want the humans
seeing their existing slaves of many species, or they might just guess what the Korozhet were up to.

  It appeared that all pretense had now been abandoned. Yetteth was one of a group that were ordered to go out to the slave preprocessing station where the humans were being mindwiped. Someone had to move the empty and comatose bodies across to the implant station. It was not an easily mechanized task, and Korozhet did not do manual labor. That was for the lower phyla.

  The alien air smelled sweet. After the naphthalene reek of the ship any air would have smelled sweet, but this was really pleasant. A little dry and rather warm, but certainly something to set the scent tendrils tingling. Yetteth fluffed them out slightly, picking up every nuance as the second force field was dropped and they walked across to the preprocessing station.

  Yetteth nearly earned himself a nerve-lashing. He stopped… His scent tendrils flared, nearly doubling in size.

  The breeze brought him a scent he never ever expected to smell again.

  One of the People.

  Female. And she was within a relatively short swing or swim.

  Hastily he walked on, seeing that the overseer was heading back this way on its floater.

  The cage was full of humans. They were still clothed, and their eyes were open. But there was nothing behind those empty eyes. Korozhet mindwiping techniques scoured all traces of memory and existing personality from the brain. For all practical purposes, these "people" were newborn babes. Not even that-fetuses, in a nonexistent womb.

  With a sigh, he began the work he was ordered to do. In low gravity like this, carrying a human was an easy thing for a Jampad. He picked up the first one, a female with yellow head-filaments, and carried her across to the implant-station. Then he came back for the next one. And then the next one.

  A Korozhet hovertank came hurtling drunkenly across the open field. There was smoke trailing from it. The plex-dome was shattered-and Yetteth knew from his own combat experience that it took a huge force to even damage it. Of the normal crew of fifteen Korozhet with dozens of Nerba to man the paralyzers and do the heavy lifting, there was very little sign.

  The hovertank dropped clumsily in front of the preprocessing station. One of the masters got out with a dripping, small, longnosed creature balanced on two spines.

  Yetteth dared not wait and watch, much as he wanted to. He carried the next human across. This was another female, with lips of a peculiar color-like the ice fens of his home planet. Odd. He'd never seen another human with that color lips. Perhaps that was an the result of the mindscrub. The effects of the process were sometimes extreme. Some of the mindwiped humans weren't just comatose, they were dead. He remembered the human woman who had died in the slave quarters. Her lips had gone blue.

  Inside the preprocessing station he was told to put her onto the work surface.

  "Strip the false integuments off her, slave," snapped the inserter.

  As he did so, Yetteth saw that the remains of the small creature lay on one side of the workslab. It had been split in half and the soft-cyber implant was being removed from its brain.

  The Third-instar who had brought the creature in was still talking, clacking its spines in agitation. "… ambush. All of Fourth-instar Cattat's crew were killed. This is one of the rebels…"

  "I understand that," said the inserter impatiently. "That is why I am removing the implant." The Korozhet pointed a spine at the human female with the odd-colored lips. "I will insert it in this creature, so we can begin an interrogation."

  The inserter noticed Yetteth had finished preparing the human female. "Take this filth away." He pointed a spine at the small, stumpy-tailed creature.

  Yetteth picked up the small creature's remains. Despite many scars on the body, the fur was still very soft.

  Once outside he took a chance, and put it down, gently, in the gathering dark. Nothing that had fought such a fight and managed to inflict such damage on the… Crotchets, should be tossed in with the regurgitated remains of Korozhet dinners. He would have burned it with honor, if he could.

  Obviously the Third-instar's concern had been relayed to the High-spine, because Yetteth found himself and the other slaves being whipped and sent back to the ship in haste. The cages of humans were left to their own devices as the hovertank and the Korozhet retreated back into their force-fielded ship.

  ***

  Eric Flint

  The Rats, the Bats amp; the Ugly

  All life can be expressed as a stream of machine-code.

  This scene is, too.

  "I'd like to test it," said the pimply-faced programmer. "There might be a bug."

  "No time," said Liepsich. "It works or it doesn't work. And down here we'll have no way of knowing. Kill the jamming. We'll have to go with it."

  "The minute we stop they'll send their signal. Anything that has a soft-cyber will turn on humans."

  "That's a chance we'll have to take. We'll be transmitting within seconds, I hope."

  Pimple-face shrugged. It was a lot of weight on nineteen-year-old shoulders. But the best programmers in the colony were terrifyingly young. "Okay, we're ready to rock-and-roll. I couldn't strip out all of the Korozhet terms without leaving gaping holes in the software. The programs would have crashed. So I've inserted a human 'and/if' replace statement."

  "Which human?" said Liepsich, pausing in the very act of hitting the jammer toggle.

  "Oh, he's long dead. One these classical music figures from old earth. Did some melodies that are still around."

  "Quality lasts," said Liepsich hitting the button. "What was his name?"

  "Elvis Presley."

  ***

  Virginia knew to the microsecond when the jamming transmissions stopped. She'd just been thinking about how incredibly stupid she'd been to let fear drive her into volunteering herself to a cell with rats that were getting hungrier and hungrier, with no sign of more food being delivered, instead of taking her chainsaw and at least having a go at the… Crotchets, when it hit.

  Suddenly she knew that she had to get back to the ship. Had to! Had to come and defend the beloved masters. They needed her. They needed her now.

  A weak part of her mind creeled in revulsion and fear. She had just time to see Nym and Doc neatly engineer a slowshield interdiction which cut into the door-metal…

  When it all changed.

  She no longer had any desire to run to help any master. Only a vague inclination to do a pelvic thrust. For the first time since Chip had been kidnapped she managed to smile.

  "Right." She took a deep breath. "I hate Korozhet. I want to kill the Korozhet!"

  ***

  Soon they were walking down the road to the paratrooper base-except of course for the bats who flew above, chanting: "Kill Korozhet!"

  Well. Fluff stood on her head and hooked his thumbs into his waistcoat pockets. "I speet upon hound dog Korozhet," he said proudly.

  There was a solitary sentry at the base. He was the one who had been supposed to bring their next meal.

  "I was just bringing it. Honestly. Just the radio started working again. I've been talking to Lieutenant Colonel Van Klomp. We've got contact with the front. With all the army divisions and the other towns! We'll be bringing reinforcements in. We've got a fighting chance at last."

  "Get on that radio again," snapped Ginny. "And tell him to get his broad behind over here as fast as possible. Tell him it's Virginia Shaw. And tell him I have an answer. Make it quick!"

  Virginia's name still got attention. Less than fifteen minutes later Van Klomp arrived, with a tall, grim-looking scar-faced man. "I thought you were supposed to be in jail," said Van Klomp.

  There was just an edge of tenseness in the gruff voice. Hinting that if she was some kind of trap for Korozhet… she would be dead very rapidly.

  "Suspicious minds," said Virginia with a smile. "You can thank Liepsich that that won't be necessary any more. That's why he isn't jamming the airwaves any more. They've broadcast a virus in the last couple of minutes. I can h
ate Korozhet now. If I can hate Korozhet, I can kill Korozhet. And Lord almighty, I feel my temperature rising."

  "And you couldn't have even said that before," said the scar-faced man. "Well, it came too late for my Ariel."

  Van Klomp's eyes narrowed. "So that bastard Liepsich survived the missile attack. I might have guessed. We've been running medical search and rescue around the old ship. We've only found two bodies so far."

  "Presumably that's what that party of Korozhet were after," said the tall scar-faced man.

  "Yep, Fitz." Van Klomp put his hand on the other man's shoulder. "I know it's no consolation, but that ambush of yours saved millions of other implanted creatures."

  "And I want to take that liberation into the heart of that Korozhet ship, and blow it wide open," said Virginia. "And I am the only one who can. At least we are the only ones who can. But I'm prepared to do it. They believe the implanted animals are coming. And Darleth has told us only implants and Korozhet will get in through the portal."

  "What?" demanded Van Klomp.

  Virginia spelled it out. "Get Liepsich out of his hidey-hole. Get me a transmitter and I'll take it into that ship. If Darleth is right, it's full of implanted slaves."

  Fluff leapt to the floor. "Senorita, you will not. Only fools weel rush in where wise men fear to tread. I, Don Juan el Magnifico de Gigantico de Immaculata Conception y Major de Todos Saavedra Quixote de la Mancha, will go."

  "Oh, we'll come too, Don Fluffy." Doll gave him a lewd wink. "Unless that Sally Lunn hath stalled my variety. She played the strumpet in your bed."

  "Wench stealer," muttered Pistol. "Now there are three hogsheads of whiskey that say I should go…"

  "I'm going," said Ginny with a grim finality. "They took Charles Connolly. And I'm going to get him back."