Ginger Gianesco was used to working under adverse conditions. A woman didn't achieve an appointment as Operations Director of a colony like Rustenberg without the know-how to keep a community running under difficult conditions. Ginger—whose sixty-first birthday was a week away—had brought to the Thule Expedition forty years of experience, including three two-year tours as OD of highly profitable mines on other colony worlds. Those mines had been running deep into the red before she'd turned them around, mainly by improving the lives of the miners until they were cheerfully churning out solid profit—two factors inextricably interwoven in operations on far-flung colonies, out beyond the reach of civilized luxuries. She'd run successful mining ops through fire, flood, and famine, on howling methane hells and airless moons and swamps so treacherous, a body had to put on biochem isolation suits just to step out the front door.
But she'd never poured a plascrete defensive wall or dug bomb shelters during a hurricane-force ice storm, under the guns of an alien enemy. A more generous God would have thrown only one of those curves at Rustenberg; but the local gods seemed a bit short of generosity. Those gods had given them a Thulian winter storm breaking six weeks too soon and a surprise sentient native species that wasn't supposed to exist, doing its dead-level best to exterminate Ginger Gianesco and every man, woman, and screaming infant under her care. If that ecosystem biologist over at Eisenbrucke Station hadn't stumbled across the Tersae three months ago, the surprise attack against every colony on Thule would have been even more shocking. As it was . . .
Her comm link crackled wildly.
"Movement on the southern perimeter!"
Harriet James' position, she realized grimly, along the unfinished stretch that hadn't been poured, yet. Harriet's voice was shaking, from cold or fright or both. Ginger, busy directing the team using shaft-boring equipment to dig shelters out of the basalt bedrock, keyed the mike and shouted above the howl of wind, freezing rain, and sleet. "How many and how close?"
"Looks like twenty of 'em, at least." A burst of static interrupted Harriet. ". . . three hundred meters out and closing fast. Jeezus, those damned hairy birds can move . . ." More static. "They've got one team shooting at us from a wood line, two others leapfrogging it toward us in three-second sprints, one shooting while the other one runs. Comin' in with the wind at their backs, damn 'em—we can't even see 'em half the time with this storm in our faces, and the sleet's clogging our optics—"
Another burst of static interrupted.
"Wilson," Ginger barked into the comm link, "get your people into position! Move it! We've got incoming at the southern breakpoint."
"Roger that, heading out now. That ice slick we poured a few hours ago ought to slow 'em down, at least." Jeremy Wilson, who had seen active military service in the Concordiat Infantry, had already saved hundreds of lives with his creative flow of nasty tricks to slow down the enemy. He'd ordered a slurry of water and mud poured in a broad sheet outside the one remaining hole in their plascrete defensive wall, a slurry that had solidified into black ice, slick as the bottom circle of hell and hard to see until it was too late. And beyond that, a thin crust of ice over a deep pit gouged out in the night and covered over with a roof of filmilon fabric and water, the filmilon later dissolved from underneath with solvents that left a treacherous crust of ice above the acid-filled pit.
The nine men and women of Jeremy's "commando unit" had served in various other military branches, mostly the navy. They were armed now with civilian hunting rifles, brought in to defend mining parties from Thule's more aggressive predator species. Huh, she thought darkly, they don't come much more aggressive than kamikaze maniacs. . . . If Ginger's people could just get this last section of wall poured, they'd have a defensible perimeter enclosing the heart of the town, including the medical clinic, school, and meeting hall. With a wall to slow down the Tersae and shelters to get the noncombatants underground, out of direct enemy fire, at least the kids might survive.
Ginger snarled at the wind and shouted the warning to her drillers to look sharp for possible breakthroughs from the south. The last three days had blurred into one long, sleepless tunnel of desperation, with brutal memories etched indelibly into her consciousness: small groups of heavily armed Tersae warriors charging in from the teeth of the storm; the crack of rifle fire, sharp as the sound of breaking rock; spurts of flame in the darkness as Tersae snipers gained the cover of warehouses and ore depots, firing with frightful accuracy from rooftops and doorways; the screams and jerking, disjointed falls as men and women went down, fatally hit by enemy weapons—thirty of her best people dead in only three days. The arcing, hideously graceful flight of sophisticated antipersonnel mortar rounds and high-explosive bombs lobbed into streets, warehouses, and homes around the edge of town. The first rounds had missed their targets as the wind snatched the incoming rounds off course—but the Tersae gunners learned fast how to correct their trajectories.
And everywhere, from every side, Tersae dying, gleefully, under the frantic guns of the defenders while explosions trapped the colonists inside a ring of blazing buildings. Fires hot enough to melt iron would've cooked them alive, if not for the freezing rain and sleet of the storm. Those fires had forced a steady retreat toward the very core of town, abandoning supplies they couldn't shift under enemy fire. And through it all, the numbing, bruising rush to knock together hasty wooden forms and pour a protective wall around the subterranean shelters they were gouging out of the ground, trying to hold on long enough for Concordiat military help to arrive.
Just a few more hours, Ginger prayed, we can have it all done in just a few more hours.
As though to mock her prayer, explosions rocked the southern perimeter. A massive fireball rose up beyond the rooftops and the ice-coated wooden forms of the unfinished wall. Omigod . . . Ginger was already running, slinging her rifle across her back and shouting orders into her comm link. "Hank, keep those shaft-boring drills going! Zephrim, what can you see from up there?"
The teenaged boy posted as southern lookout on the school's rooftop was sobbing into his own comm link. "They've got missiles, goddamned high-explosive guided missiles, started shooting 'em from the trees after the first batch of 'em fell into the acid pits and the second batch fell down on the black ice long enough to blow their heads off—oh, shit, here comes another wave—"
More explosions rocked the southern perimeter. The school—and young Zephrim—went up in a blast of heat and a shock wave that jarred Ginger's teeth from a distance of three hundred meters. She shook herself groggily, fumbled with the comm link strapped to her wrist. "We've got a gap in the southern perimeter! Anybody with a rifle, close that gap!" She saw people running, sliding on the glare of ice laid down by the freezing rain, slipping and throwing themselves back to their feet again, rushing to fill the southern gap. A dark wave of misshapen bodies hurled through the smoke and ruins, silhouetted against the blazing fires. The Tersae were immense shapes towering seven, eight feet high, carrying oddly shaped rifles and shooting at anything that moved.
When a hail of rifle fire blasted toward her, Ginger threw herself prone, her own weapon a bruising weight across her spine. She dragged the rifle off her shoulder and pulled it around to shoot from where she lay, sprawled prone in the slush and slurry. She sighted and fired, centering the bastards and squeezing off the rounds, jolting her shoulder with bruising force because she couldn't rise up enough to properly seat the weapon in the pocket of her shoulder. One of the furry bastards went down screaming, then another, and a third . . . Christ, how many of them were there? She saw the high, arcing flight of the grenade, knew she couldn't possibly scramble up and run fast enough to avoid it—
Tommy Watkins, eleven years old and howling obscenities his mother had never taught him, lunged in front of her. He swung a baseball bat with all his eleven-year-old strength. CRACK! The grenade spun away with home-run velocity and distance. It struck a house wall, bounced, and exploded in the gut of a startled Tersae warrior. The alien vanished in a red rain of debris that fell in gobbets and stained the icy slush crimson.
"C'mon!" Tommy was shouting, tugging at her arm. "We gotta get to the wall!"
Ginger climbed somehow to her feet, ran forward on rubberized legs while gasping into her comm link, "Report! What the hell's happening at the gap?"
She could hear weird, alien screams, human cries of agony and rage, the staccato reports of rifle fire and the deeper roar of explosions. Wind-flung sleet nearly blinded her as they rounded the corner of the blazing school and headed toward the embattled gap. Bodies lay sprawled everywhere, twisted in death, still writhing in the last moments of dying. At least some of those shapes were Tersae, shooting even as they died. The ones still moving, the great, furry shapes of the not-quite-birds that constituted the enemy, Ginger pumped rounds into from her rifle, skull shots that ended the twisting and the weird, alien screams. The ruthlessness of it shocked her, even as she snarled and fired again methodically, moving from one wounded Tersae to the next. Tommy laid about with his baseball bat, crushing the skulls of those merely twitching, safe enough to approach but still dangerously alive.
Until the bat came whistling down across eyes and strange, hooked beaks.
Blood sprayed scarlet against the glare of ice and sleet. Sickness rose in the back of Ginger's throat. She chugged it down again and kept going. "Report, dammit!" she shouted into the comm link again. Jennifer Granger's voice, shrill through the static, sobbed out, "I can't see very well, but it looks like we're holding 'em."
Jennifer Granger, fifteen years old, perched atop the meeting hall . . .
Ginger was close enough, now, to see that Jennifer was right. The fighting at the gap was desperate, but rifle-wielding miners were driving the enemy back through the gap in the wall, a gap blown through the wooden forms with high-explosive rounds. Ginger took up a good, solid stance, braced the rifle in the hollow of her bruised shoulder, and added her fire to the pitched battle, dropping two of the bastards in their taloned tracks.
Within minutes, it was over.
This time.
She couldn't afford to let her people stop to catch their breath. "Mandy," she grabbed the nearest crew chief she could find, "pull together a crew and get to work on these ruined forms. Tear this section down and rebuild it, stat. I want every able-bodied adult we've got left pouring this section within the hour."
"But—" Mandy sputtered, face grey with exhaustion. "That won't leave anyone to man the guns!"
"Get the kids out here," Ginger said grimly. "Any child big enough to lift a rifle. Put 'em on top of the poured sections to either side of this gap, but get 'em armed and get 'em in position." She picked up a rifle from Jeremy Wilson's bloodied fingers, trying desperately not to look at the ghastly red ruin where the top of his head had been, and thrust the weapon into Tommy's hands—then turned a glare on Mandy's shocked expression. "You don't like it? Got any better ideas? I didn't think so. Move, dammit!"
It was only in her heart—cold as the howling sleet beating against her face—that Ginger wept.