LITMIR.BIZ

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eight or ten of his attackers. Free for the moment, he increased power to his repulsors and moved his pod higher. “Blue One!” he called. “Fall back! You’ve got a hole burned through your nano!”

      As if encouraged by the sniper’s partial success, other electron bolts began snapping out of the jungle. Dozens of the Krysni shriveled and fell, or vanished in white puffs of vapor, victims of friendly fire, but the unarmed mob kept moving forward, ignoring casualties from both sides of the battle, trying to overwhelm the twelve Marine battle pods by sheer weight of numbers.

      Garwe’s pod had already located each enemy shooter and plotted them on his targeting matrix, revealing them on his IHD as flashing, bright red reticules. He selected the one that had hit the captain and triggered his pod’s primary weapon, sending a megajoule pulse of X-ray laser energy slashing into the jungle.

      Purple and orange vegetation shriveled and died; the Reef’s tentacles curled back from the high-energy caress, and the compound’s support platform shuddered as the vast life form that was Hassetas reacted to the heat.

      “Skipper!” Garwe yelled! “Request permission to disengage! If we can just maneuver—”

      “Negative!” Xander snapped back. “We do it by the opplan!”

      The opplan—the operations plan downloaded from the squadron’s command constellation—required the War Dogs to deploy on the compound platform and provide a kind of barricade for the off-worlders, protecting them from the locals until a transport could make it down from orbit. The Marines would hold the perimeter until the off-worlders could evacuate, then pull out.

      Ideally, no shots would have been fired, and the mere presence of the Marine battlepods should have kept the Krysni at bay. Somehow, things hadn’t quite worked out that way, however.

      Garwe kept firing into the jungle, targeting Krysni power sources as his pod’s sensor suite picked them up and flagged them on his in-head display. The off-worlder compound was trembling and bucking now as the floatreef moved the massive, main tentacle to which it was anchored.

      “Trolischet!” Xander snapped on the general frequency. “I suggest you get your people off of the compound platform!”

      “We can’t!” Trolischet replied, her voice shrill. “We have no ship!”

      “An evacuation ship is inbound,” Xander told her. “ETA less than ten minutes! But you might not have ten minutes! You need to get everyone into evacuation pods, fliers, flight-capable suits, whatever you have that will carry you. All you need to do is to get off this damned reef before it decides to scratch!”

      “There are over two hundred of us, Captain! We couldn’t save more than a quarter!”

      “Well, then, save them, damn it! Or you’re all dead!”

      Other Marines were targeting the snipers now as well, those that could still move and had not been completely engulfed by the advancing wall of balloon bodies and angry, lashing tentacles. Garwe pivoted, targeting a second source of high-energy electron beams, and then three bolts caught him at once, slamming into his Starwraith in a searing detonation of raw energy.

      Warning lights winked on in his IHD, his defensive fields flickering and dimming beneath the overload. A half-second later, three more beams struck and his nanodefenses went down, slabs of active nano burned from the Starwraith’s outer shell, oily smoke boiling from a puncture in the foametal structure beneath.

      Garwe cut his repulsors, dropping back into the relative cover of the tentacle-to-tentacle melee below. His pod jostled and bumped in the press of leathery balloon bodies and lashing tentacles as he rerouted the majority of his power flow to the task of repairing his outer-shell nano. He tried discharging a few thousand volts through what was left of his outer nano, but the attempt brought up more warning lights and no other effect.

      The Krysni appeared to be learning quickly. Captain Xander’s Starwraith had been hit again repeatedly, and Palin, Mortin, and Javlotel were down as well, large patches of their nanoshells burned and peeled away, exposed portions of their inner armor partly melted under the fierce heat of the enemy fire.

      And it was all wrong. The two symbiotic sentient species of Dac IV weren’t technic, and didn’t have manufactured weaponry of any sort. Individual Krysni possessed a biological weapon—a toxin delivered through hollow, pressure-fired barbs like a terrestrial jellyfish—which they used when necessary against some of the mindless predators of Dac IV’s deeper atmosphere layers, but those were useless against a Starwraith, even one as badly damaged as Garwe’s. And without a solid surface from which to mine and forge metals, indeed, without fire, the Krysni and their immense and sapient floating cities had never developed anything remotely like material technology at all.

      Where in hell had they gotten electron beam weaponry? Who had taught them how to use it?

      At the moment, the press of Krysni balloons around him were doing quite well without advanced technology. His crippled Starwraith was now covered by leathery blue bodies clinging tightly to his armor, their floater sacs deflated, with hundreds more Krysni clinging in layers on top of them. He could see what they were doing by picking up a visual feed from Blue Twelve—Lieutenant Namura’s wraith. It looked as though some hundreds of the creatures were clinging to him, with the outer layers inflating their bodies in an attempt to lift him clear of the deck. More and more Krysni floaters were hooking on, puffing up their bodies to well over a meter in diameter, taut-skinned globes filled with biochemically heated hydrogen.

      He fired his X-ray laser, the beam punching through bodies and releasing a roiling cloud of smoke. More Krysni drifted in to replace the ones incinerated by his attack. He fired again … and then a third time, each shot burning away dozens of the things, but then his power reserves plummeted and the laser cut out after the third pulse.

      “Blue Flight, this is Blue Seven!” he called out. “My weapons are dead!”

      “Same here!” Lieutenant Radevic shouted. “Weapon power leads are burned through!”

      “Blue, Blue Two!” Amendes said. “Repulsors out! Weapons down! I’ve gone—”

      And then static hissed through the comm feed, as Garwe’s in-head display, with tiny icons for each of the Blue Flight Marines, showed twelve symbols drop to eleven … then ten.

      Overwhelming numbers were beginning to tell at last. Garwe found it hard to believe, impossible to believe … but the Dac balloonists were attacking a squadron of modern Marine battle pods and winning. It simply wasn’t possible. …

      Abruptly, his pod shifted to the right, then inverted … came upright, then inverted again. Slowly, clumsily, they were moving him. He could feel the scrape and roll of tightly packed bodies as they moved. Some hundreds, now, were clinging to the squirming mass of creatures on the inside of the ball, inflating their bodies to levitate the entire, cumbersome mass, while others vented hydrogen like tiny jets in frantic, rapid pulses, shoving him toward the edge of the platform.

      Gods! A Starwraith massed almost half a ton under Dac’s gravity. How many of the creatures would it take to negate that weight and actually float him off the platform?

      Or perhaps they weren’t actually trying to lift him, but simply to push or drag or roll him off the side. The edge of the tree house deck that was not bordered by the massive bulk of the floatreef tentacles and the surrounding aerial flora was protected by a relatively slender guardrail, and it was less than twenty meters away. If they could get him through the railing, he and some hundreds of clinging Krysni would plummet over the edge and into the black, hot, and crushing depths of the gas giant’s atmospheric deeps. His attackers seemed utterly unconcerned about their own casualties; those crushed up against his optic sensors appeared to be dead already. Evidently, they were willing to sacrifice themselves by the hundreds simply to ensure the destruction of a single Starwraith.

      He tried triggering his repulsors, but nothing happened. His primary drive power feed had melted through and shorted out. If he could just take flight, drag this whole, squirming mass high enough

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