Danton nodded. Van Ness said, "The wounded, the dead and the dying. I
guess you could say we've come home again."
Danton slowly licked his lips. The fifty-years war against the
Oligarchs hadn't been like this. His war had been swift and clean and
shiny as the metal cities that went with the bright hot flames of
atomic fission. Now the smells of sweating men drifted to him, the
smell of blood and of death.
Weary, white-faced, shabbily-uniformed men filing by. Many hobbled,
wounded, swinging along in a freakish dance. Crude stretchers carrying
others, somewhat resentfully. Amtracs hauled still others, some
wounded, others dying, some already dead. The sounds of bombardment
edged nearer through the moonlight. The column moved faster. And
Danton noticed then that the women were there, uniformed, hardly
distinguishable from the men.
The ground jarred. Projectiles screamed. An amtrac rose up in a
blossoming cone, fell apart, metal shining and bodies disintegrating. A
small detachment swung in squarely toward Danton's position. The three
men faded back into deeper concealment.
A tired, thickly-bearded line-officer barked an order. "Thomas! Rennin!
Take the bodies away at once. According to the map, there's a disposal
mart half a mile east!"
The torn bodies were rolled onto stretchers and carried into the
shadows.
Danton thought: some pestilence probably. They have to get rid of the
bodies fast. But why under the stress of immediate attack?
The line-officer was saying, "Men. We've been under constant attack
for eighty-five days. Our survival depends on orderly retreat until we
combine forces with Rudolph's Second Army."
A woman stopped walking. Her face was streaked with dirt. She yelled,
"Why doesn't the Power give us some real weapons? With a real power gun
we could kill every Redbird that--"
The line-officer brought his revolver up, fired. The back of the
woman's head exploded as the flattened bullet came out. The officer's
face twitched. "Barrows! Select a man, take her to the disposal mart."
"Yes, sir."
After the body was gone, Danton stared dazedly at the spot where
the woman had fallen. The officer was saying, "Any reference to the
Powers other than that necessitated by duty and reverence, is punished
immediately by execution." Then the officer sat down and looked blankly
into the moonlight. That was a quotation from a manual, Danton thought.
But the officer--hadn't meant it. He hadn't wanted to shoot the woman.
That might be very important to consider.
Presently the officer stood up. "Men. The Redbirds will follow up this
bombardment with a winged attack. They always do when the moons are
right. We'll remain hidden along the trail and take them as they come
in. They've never learned the strategy of ambush. Make ready for the
attack. Be alert!"
* * * * *
Danton motioned and the three of them retreated slowly, as silently as
possible. They had crawled probably a hundred yards when the attack
came.
The Redbirds were red. They also might be considered birds, with a
reptilian dominance. Their wingspread was enormous, and their bodies
were very nearly human to look at--with an alien deviation that made
them seem grotesque when they really weren't grotesque at all. In a way
they were beautiful. Red feathers and gold-flecked eyes.
And then the air was torn apart. Explosions, rushing bodies, breaking
wings, burning feathers and singeing flesh and hissing screams. The
moonlight fluttered with winged shadows.
"This is real war," Danton heard Van Ness yell. "Hand to hand. The real
thing."
Danton couldn't see either Van Ness or Keith. He fought, firing wildly
at shadows and substance. The real thing. It was strange, he thought,
but in that fifty years of the bloodiest war, the most destructive in
history--he'd never killed anything hand to hand. It had been coldly
impersonal, that war. A million here, a million there. Nine million at
once. And nothing remaining except charred craters. No bodies around.
No one crying either. Nothing at all. But this--
Van Ness's fading scream chopped down like hot steel. Danton couldn't
fire, afraid of burning Van Ness, who was being lifted up by a Redbird.
Van Ness was gone almost before Danton realized that he was being
carried up and away over the tree tops.
Danton crawled around in the flame-blasted clearing. His rifle was
gone. The Redbird's powerful wings had slammed it into shadows and
brush. He looked for Keith.
Keith!
He didn't find Keith either.
He lay still, very still. Several soldiers were poking around in the
tangled debris of bodies and blood and torn brush. It was so still all
at once. No sounds at all except the hard breathing of men. No wings
threshing, or screams penetrating.
Danton played dead. He was surprised at how easy it was.
He recognized the officer's voice. "Load everything that looks human in
a couple of amtracs and drag them to the disposal mart."
"Yes, sir."
Motors idling. Men lifting and grunting and cursing. Danton opened his
eyes just a little, stared upward into the broad river of sky far up
between the mountains:
"How many casualties?"
"Not bad. We lost a quarter maybe. We probably burned down a thousand
Redbirds."
"Where do they all come from? We'll never kill them all. They keep
coming and they'll always keep coming."
"They're supposed to come from across the white desert. We'll never
find out. Anyone striking out across that desert never comes back."