THEIR MASTER

They pushed on through the forest. A deep gloom had settled over the twenty. They were used to the constant presence of death, and even the idea that any one of them might lose limbs or be blown apart at an given moment. It was part of the function of war, part of their reality. They were so used to bodies twisted into mangled and distorted shapes that the sight of them could even inspire outbreaks of ghoulish humor. This deliberate mutilation, however, was something else. There was a gratuitousness about it that shocked men who thought they were no longer shockable. It wasn't part of the function, it was something extra, and that gave them a chill. This war was no place for extras.

As well as shock and gloom there was a carelessness about the twenty. Men trudged forward with their weapons held loosely at their sides. Some bunched up, and others straggled. The communicators murmured with low-voiced, sullen conversations, but Elmo did nothing to keep them either alert or together. Helot and Dacker caught up with Hark.

"So what did you make of that?" Helot asked.

"I'm trying not to think about it," Hark replied.

"You figure they've built a new kind of chiba?" Dacker suggested.

Hark shook his head. "I don't know. I don't know why the Yal should bother. They kill us, we kill them. Why would they need to mess with us after we're dead?"

"If those guys were dead when they messed with them," Dacker said.

"Goddamm it, don't say that. That's what I've really been trying not to think about," Helot said.

"Maybe it is a psych program," Hark suggested.

"If it is, it's like Renchett said. It's sure as hell working," Helot returned.

"Who do you think those guys were?" Helot asked.

Hark shrugged. "Advance patrol, maybe."

"The whole bloody thing gives me the creeps. I mean, that shit that was done with their dicks, sticking them in their mouths like that, somebody really knew how to get to us. How did some alien know about that shit? Huh?" Dacker shook his head.

"You want to hear something really weird?" Hark said.

"How weird can it get?" Helot put in.

"When I first saw those bodies, this thought came straight out of nowhere. I thought, Men have got to have done this. It was so close to home that it had to be men who done it."

"You're crazy. You saying our own people did that?" Dacker sounded incredulous.

"I ain't saying nothing. I just had this thought." "You are crazy." "Who ain't, in all this?"

Helot cracked his mask and spit. "I never thought I'd hear myself saying this, but I'd almost welcome some action. At least it'd be something else to think about."

"And you're calling me crazy?"

Within forty minutes, Helot got his wish. As action went, it was minor. A small gang of miggies erupted out of the ground mold, scrabbling up from where they'd buried themselves or been buried, digging themselves out with their multiple claw-ended legs and throwing chemical fire from the heaters on the tops of their squat disk-shaped bodies. There were twelve of them in all. Miggies usually came in groups of twelve. It might have been because they had twelve legs. Fortunately, there was only one group. Miggies' fire was singularly unpleasant. It didn't simply destroy-it clung and burned, and the suits were able to offer little or no protection. It spread white flame over a man until the body was completely consumed. As the first ones surfaced, Renchett yelled a warning, but it was too late. The two men immediately behind him, both new meat, were hit. The twenty opened up with a roar, blowing the scuttling machine creatures to flying component fragments. One of the recruits was dying slowly and painfully as the relentless flame spread outward from his left shoulder. His screams echoed in everyone's helmet even after they had stopped firing.

The miggies didn't have the intelligence to take evasive action. Their single strategy was a combination of concealment and surprise. They broke cover and they fired, but after that they were almost totally vulnerable. The firefight was all over in less than three minutes with no further human casualties. The last miggie left intact tried to bury itself back in the mold. Hark stood over it and reduced it to vapor with a single extended blast. As he destroyed it, he felt some of the tension draining out of him.

The twenty, now reduced to seventeen, stood white-faced and breathless with their suit-enhanced adrenaline pumping, turning and staring into the shadows beneath the fungus, looking for a follow-up to the first attack. All too often, a burst out of miggies would merely be the preliminary to a major attack by chibas. But the minutes passed and nothing happened; the men relaxed, and the suits cut back on their output of stimulants. The familiar sense of postcombat letdown started to set in. One by one, they lowered their weapons. The miggies must have been nothing more than an isolated irritant, left behind to slow the human advance. When Elmo gave the order to move on, he sounded exhausted. The dead were left behind. They were mainly ash-there wasn't enough of either of them left to bury or to carry to the next temporary base. Hark hadn't even learned their names.

Light showed up ahead between the growths of fungus in what had to be the burned area where the dynes had destroyed the Yal firetower. The growing babble of other short-range communication in their helmets confirmed it. This was the twenty's rendezvous point with the rest of the task force. Tired as they were, the troopers quickened their pace. Hot food and sleep were almost in sight. In the burned area, they would eat and make camp for the planet's strange half night. It was unlikely that the enemy would attempt anything more than a probe of the perimeter when the whole Therem battle group was assembled in one spot. Of course, the next day they would press on again, back in the stinking vegetation, but nobody thought about that. Out in the bush, they tried to live strictly in the present. A completed day was a completed day. Each man could take some comfort in his continued survival.

As they emerged from the jungle, there was something disorienting about the light and space. The sun was dropping to the horizon, and very soon the huge parent planet would fill the sky. The black charred area was a crowded chaos of activity. Everything was converging on the same point at once. Gunsaucers were coming in to land, throwing up huge clouds of dust like miniature thunderheads. Nohans and human sappers were digging foxholes and bunkers, creating their own dust clouds. Others were rigging the perimeter, the traps and the wire and the disintegration fields. The wounded were being loaded onto e-vacs, and the dead were being incinerated in one huge pit. Above it, smoke mixed with the black dust. The sunlight filtering through was turned a bloody red. The three towering dynes were attempting to raise their fallen comrade, droning at each other in their deep, resonant language. While the twenty had been in among the fungus, amphibious armored crawlers had come upriver, bringing supplies and replacement troops. They had clawed their way up the bank and were now being unloaded. In the middle of it all, two red spheres floated close to the ground, right beside the ruins of the Yal tower. It was just as if they were observing the whole operation.

The combat twenties coming in from the bush seemed somehow out of place amid all these flurries of preparation. They had yet to be told what to do. They crunched aimlessly across the fused earth and black flake ash hoping for a topman to assign them to a bivouac area. Their mood was rapidly deteriorating. The field kitchens, always an obvious goal, were being set up but had not yet opened for business. The nohans seemed to have been quicker off the mark. Lines of the armored aliens were already forming in front of the tall tubular devices that prepared their nourishment. This caused a certain noisy resentment among the troopers. The nohans never actually fought except in the most dire emergency, and the men saw it as a positive injustice that they should get to eat, or whatever they did that passed for eating, before the human fighting men. Elmo tried to stop these complaints in his twenty, but the troopers simply ignored him. Dacker was the first one to lose patience with this purposeless tramping across the assembly area. He threw down his MEW and faced Elmo.