Dragon's Egg (25 page)

Dead-Troopers dropped into lingua inter-familia, and applied her most diplomatic accent—Pink-Sky would have been proud of her. “Even hatchlings are quiet when the Swift is around,” she admonished in a soft whisper. “This dark-side cliff we have come to is along the path of the marauding troopers,” Dead-Troopers continued. “There is none other like it, since all other cliffs in this region show their faces to the bright light.”

The tension relaxed, and Dead-Troopers slid a pseudopod on the topside of Sinking-Cliff as she continued,
“The path of the troopers takes them to the bright-light side of this cliff. They will never see us behind it, and we can rush out and take them unaware.” She removed her pseudopod with a promising pat and glided off to arrange the attack.

The expedition to the east pole moved slowly on in its quiet but determined way. Scouts moved ahead to look over the horizon, but the crust was getting prickly, especially on the way back, so they did not range out as far as they had done in the past. None of them realized that the horizon off to one side was not the real horizon, but instead was the top of a precipitous cliff that sheltered a horde of barbarians behind its sharp edge.

It was to Dead-Troopers’ credit that she held her mixed pseudo-clan of warriors until the circle glided past. She released them with a terrible thump that shook the very crust under Swift-Killer’s tread and they attacked with a fury born of turn upon turn of punitive raids on their loved ones and hatchlings.

“At Alert!” t’trumed Swift-Killer, and narrowed herself down to pass through the dazed civilians to the rear of the circle.

Her automatic judgment of the tactical situation was verified when she saw the stream of barbarians seem to pour endlessly out of a notch in the horizon. Her dozen eyes lifted slightly on stubs as they once again evaluated the near perfect boundary between dark sky and glowing crust, and she saw her mistake. A slight rise of the glowing crust indicated a low cliff. Too low to see, but high enough to hide a war party of barbarians.

“East! West! North! Bright!—East! West! North! Bright!—East! …” chanted Swift-Killer as her eyes
took in the battle situation. Her troopers moved obediently in a rigid march that took them nowhere, as their bodies became attuned to the cooperative movement and the deadly needles of the dragon teeth formed their impenetrable barrier about the circle of close-coupled troopers.

The civilians peered over the flattened ranks of troopers and some of them were beginning to panic Swift-Killer lowered the intensity of her rhythmic thump on the crust as her squad leaders took up the chant to make up for the loss of her volume.

Swift-Killer circled around the inner rank of her troopers, sliding encouraging pseudopods on male and female alike, as her whisper sped through the crust, its electronic tingle emphasizing the solid thump of the squad leaders.

“…  North! Bright!—East! West! North! …”

At the same time, she thinned out the inner third of her body and spread a thin hatching mantle over the bewildered noncombatants at the center. In almost automatic reflex action, their bodies reverted to minimum area, and they huddled together under the protective cloak. As the pressure in the center was released, the ranks of troopers compacted, and the needle points at the outer ring grew imperceptibly closer together.

Swift-Killer watched the charge of the barbarians with cool detachment. Although they came in a group, they were still individuals, and the first of those individuals actually to make contact with the deadly circle of dragon teeth would die, and both she and the barbarians knew that horrible fact.

“…  West! North! Bright!—East! West! North!…” Swift-Killer added the thump of her tread to the clamor as the barbarians approached. With a roar that shook the very crust, they came straight along the easy direction from the west, then broke into two peeling
waves that plowed their way off into the hard directions toward the north and Bright sides.

Swift-Killer had expected the attack to break off in the face of a well-tended circle. What she had not expected was the rattle of pod seeds and smooth rocks rolling and sliding across the crust toward her circle of troopers. That was all that they were, rocks and garbage from an ordinary pod meal, but the unexpected did to her troopers what anything unexpected would do to any group—it confused them. In their effort to avoid what was harmless, the troopers slid to one side or the other. Their careful cadence was lost and the impenetrable barrier of needlelike dragon teeth wavered.

From the middle of the still flowing barbarian horde burst Dead-Troopers and five of her warriors. They were nearly hidden by their load of undried cheela skin. Swift-Killer’s eyes shrank at the sight, but she had to admire the tactical effectiveness of the result. As the raw cheela skin contacted the pricks of the dragon teeth, the natural death reflexes in the muscular skin pouched up and grasped the points of the dragon teeth in viselike sphincters.

Backing off for a moment, the barbarians let the skins drag the ends of the deadly needles to the crust, and then flowed over their grisly weapon and pinned the circle defenses under their treads as they encountered the outer perimeter, their clubs and stolen short swords shattering crystal and slashing skin.

“West! West! West! West! …” t’trumed Swift-Killer as she changed the cadence and moved the circle into the direction of the attack. The small knot of fighting troopers and barbarians stayed fixed, each slashing where they could at the small amount of skin exposed behind their shields of dried skin or Flow Slow plates. Meanwhile, the steady cadence moved the circle of troopers around the point of attack, like a cell enveloping its struggling prey. The surprise was gone,
and the next rapid attack of the barbarians from the east did not produce the desired confusion when a rattle of crustal pebbles and pod seeds came sliding across the crust. The needle points of the dragon teeth did not waver, and the holders of the remainder of the poor unfortunate cheela who had unwillingly donated his very skin to the cause of the barbarian attack left their glowing white juices dripping off the ends of the dragon teeth.

“Out! Out! Out! Out!” Swift-Killer commanded. She expanded the circle in all directions, but most importantly in the direction towards the clump of barbarian warriors. The pincher closed and the needle points of the dragon teeth began to have their effect.

With the trap shut, Swift-Killer pulled back her mantle from over the civilians. Making herself into an avenging needle, she slipped her huge bulk between two of her troopers in the rear ranks. Three knives held in front of her and her short sword trailing behind, she screeched a high pitched whisper that threw the knot of combatants into confusion, and dove in under their bodies, knives slashing.

Swift-Killer climbed out of the hole she had carved out of the middle of Dead-Troopers’ body, glowing juices running down her eye-stubs. She then attacked the rest of the beleaguered barbarians from behind. Their initiative was lost, and it took little time for the troopers to finish them all with thrusts of their short swords.

Swift-Killer looked across the topsides of the still quivering bags of juice and surveyed her command. True to the tradition of trooper discipline, even if the commander seemed to ignore it, the squad leaders had disengaged the little knot of dead and wounded to the inside, and a nearly perfect circle of regrouped troopers were now arrayed in rank after rank, their needle points in perfect array as the cadence continued. “East! West!
North! Bright!—East! West! North! …” The remainder of the barbarian horde sent taunts and curses through the crust, made weaker and weaker feinting attacks, and finally faded off over the horizon.

Swift-Killer shivered her skin, sending yellow-white globs of cooling juice showering down on the bare topsides of the motionless layers of skin beneath her tread. She slowly flowed down off the sagging mound of flesh, checking each one of her short slashing blades before inserting them back into her lined weapons pouch. As she descended, her tread automatically kneaded the flaccid skin beneath her and worked out the lumps that were hidden away in the enemy skin pouches.

One cache yielded buttons. Swift-Killer paused in shock. There were three single buttons that signaled that each had come from trooper; a doublet button that used to grace the skin of a squad leader; and another with four buttons that matched the one that now glistened wetly on her supple skin.

“The Trooper-Killer!” she said, and fury sent her short sword again and again through the already damaged brain-knot. Her exhaustion forgotten in the discovery, she moved the dead hunks of meat off the sworn enemy of every troop commander of the east border, and proceeded to strip the tiniest pouch of that dead hulking body.

To her dismay, she found four more trooper buttons—well tarnished—in an almost sealed-off pouch, but nothing else.

“Kill! Kill! Kill!” she murmured. “Nothing to live for but to kill troopers.”

She went on to the other bodies, glancing around as she did so to notice that the battle was over and the circle was back in its proper form. One body yielded a trooper button, but this one came from the holding sphincter of a trooper, who had died defending its honor. She searched the periphery until she found
the trooper’s heritage pouch, and she slowly kneaded it until she extracted the mementos given to the trooper as he left his clan to join the eastern border guard. She separated the personal ones from the clan ones, tossing most of the personal ones to the crust but taking those that might be of value to her some turn. She put the clan totem into a special pouch that she sealed until she might, at some future time, deliver it to the clan chief, while giving thanks for the assistance of that segment of the clan in the protection of the far-flung borders of Bright’s Empire.

“It is a good thing that we lose so few troopers in these skirmishes with the barbarians,” she thought to herself, “or else the troop commanders would be so laden down with clan totems that they would not be able to move.”

At the thought, she self-consciously twitched the little pouch in a forgotten segment of her body that had not been opened for over three dozen greats of turns, and would not—until death relaxed the sphincter that kept her little piece of homeland and kin within her.

Swift-Killer continued her search. Two of her troopers and six barbarians. A poor trade. And it was her fault for not having trained her troopers against the “rolling garbage” attack. It was an old and seldom used tactic, but in this time and in this environment it had come close to equaling the odds for the barbarians.

Kneading a recalcitrant pouch on one of the last barbarian skin sacks, she almost cut her tread. Moving off and sliding a pseudopod under the edge of the folded skin, she extracted a short sword. The fact that a barbarian had succeeded in wresting a short sword from a trooper was not unusual, but the condition of the short sword was. She examined its shining sides and keenly honed edge with wonder. If only her troopers could be encouraged to keep their weapons
in such good condition! She pouched the shining sword in her weapons pouch and finished the inspection, then finally turned to cleaning herself.

The troop was still on full circle march alert, when she finally finished and resumed command.

“Rest!” rolled the command through the crust, and the gleaming needles of the dragon teeth stopped in space, paused, then relaxed into a disarrayed, but still outward-facing circle.

“Make camp!

“Post Guards!

“Squad Leaders Report!”

The commands rippled out through the crust and the troop camp took on its normal life style as the subordinates interpreted the Commander’s orders, added a few of their own for local order and discipline, and then gathered near the mound of cooling bodies for a conference with their Troop Commander.

“We are in no real hurry,” Swift-Killer announced to them. “And we have a long way to go in hostile territory without food storage depots. We will stop here long enough to dry the meat, then we will move on to the east.”

The squad leaders were pleased with the Commander’s decision. The troopers had been on constant march for a dozen turns, and this break would not only give the more restless ones a few moments to relieve the pressure of their juices, but would also give the whole command a chance to revert to a seminormal life style, not to mention a welcome change in diet from the ever-present food pods.

The squad leaders had no trouble in getting volunteers for butcher duty, and soon the whole pile of eight bodies was neatly drained, the muscular meat carefully sliced from the skin and the leathery skin stretched out as far as it would go in the easy direction. The ends were held down with the ample weight
of a couple of otherwise useless novice astrologers, and left to dry for a turn on the glowing crust, until they were ready to rewrap the meat hunks that they had so recently enveloped.

When the butchering crew came to the eggs, there was a lengthy pause. One of the troopers and the Trooper-Killer barbarian were found to have eggs in their egg cases. Unfortunately for the sensibilities of the butchering crew, the precious egglings were still alive in their leathery sacs.

The news of the living egglings brought Swift-Killer to the scene at once. As much as she hated it, it was her duty to pass judgment. She looked carefully at the leathery egg-sacs, sliding each one in turn under the protection of a hatching mantle to feel the pulsating life form within.

Unfortunately, the pulsations from the wee ones only confirmed what they all knew. Egg-sacs with that color had no chance of surviving without many more turns of protection and nourishment within their mother.

Swift-Killer felt the terrible urge to lift the little eggling into her egg case—to give it the protection and nourishment that it needed. But she knew full well that within one turn, her normally protective egg case would have swollen into a bloated anger, and the vile juices that it would have exuded would have literally dissolved the egg sac and its precious cargo. As much as they all would have liked to have saved them, the egglings were doomed.