Narakan Rifles, About Face! Part 5

The Rumi's grip relaxed slightly and Terrence drove his fist full into its face and locked his legs about its waist. The catman couldn't have weighed more than a hundred and fifty pounds but all of it was wiry strength. It clawed at him now, ripping his protective clothing and gashing his legs, meanwhile trying to get its knife into play. He was vaguely conscious that his men had disposed of the rest of the Rumi and were dancing around him frantically trying to get a chance to aid him. He was struck by the incongruity of a civilized being descended from simian ancestors and a civilized being descended from feline ancestors fighting fang and claw while a bunch of misplaced amphibians danced about them.

Making his weight count he suddenly twisted and hurled the Rumi under him but something hit him a terrific blow on the back of the head and blackness closed in.

V

O'Mara awoke with a head that felt like all the hangovers of a misspent life.

"Have a nice rest?" Bill Fielding asked.

Terrence reached a weak hand to the back of his head and felt bandages. "Did I catch a spring bolt?" he asked.

Bill grinned, "Well, no. Not exactly. It was more on the order of Private O'Hara's rifle b.u.t.t. He was trying to hit the Rumi you were necking with."

"I might have known," Terrence groaned.

"We lost six men but recovered all the bodies except for one. We've got four wounded ... litter cases. Thought you were going to make it five for a while."

"Well, they won't slow us down too much. We still have about a hundred and fifty miles to go. We'll camp here for the night and move out at dawn."

Marching in the early morning and resting in the heat of the day before another afternoon march, the Narakan Rifles covered another fifty miles of the distance to Fort Craven without incident but not without signs of Rumi. Twice they came on recently occupied camps and once they caught sight of a Rumi patrol moving parallel to their own line of march.

The next morning, which was blistering and cloudless, they were only seventy miles from the Fort.

"Maybe we ought to give the radio another try." Terrence decided.

"We're close enough to have a chance of getting through now."

Polasky set up the field radio.

"h.e.l.lo, Balliwick. h.e.l.lo, Balliwick. This is Apple Three Three. Can you read me? Come in, please."

O'Mara and Fielding sat and listened while he repeated the call a dozen or more times. His only answer was the heavy static that Beta produced in most electronic instruments. The same static that made radar and s.p.a.ce scanners all but useless, that limited aircraft to the big dirigibles and weapons to old fashioned rifles and machine guns.

"I guess we'll know what's going on when we get there!" Terrence said.

He wiped his forehead with his arm, noticing that the heavily caked mud was beginning to crack off. He would be in for a bad case of sun poisoning probably.

A rare breeze had sprung up and drifting down it from the west came the sound of gunfire. As one man, everyone in the camp stiffened.

"Did you hear that?" demanded Fielding.

"I think I hear a Banning," Polasky said, "sounds like it's coming from in back of us ... off to the west."

"From what our scouts have been able to pick up, that's the general direction that the Rumi have been moving," Terrence said.

"But there's nothing over that way. What in h.e.l.l could they be attacking?" Fielding was on his feet, looking off in the direction from which the sounds were coming.

Terrence was aware of an increasingly uneasy feeling. He got to his feet and picked up his gear. "The sounds could be deceiving. We might as well get moving. It isn't going to get much cooler before nightfall."

An hour later they were hotly engaged with a large force of Rumi. Rumi armed for the first time with heavier weapons, mortar-like guns that hurled pods of smothering dust that caused almost instant strangulation. Rumi who attacked suddenly, giving them time only to drop to the ground and set up the Bannings and machine guns before three hundred howling fiends came charging through the gra.s.s at a dead run, firing as they came.

O'Mara was behind a machine gun and Fielding and Polasky each had a Banning in action. They met the Rumi charge with a withering hail of lead and fire. The Narakans lying as flat as their huge chests would allow them were firing as fast as the automatic rifles would fire. The Bannings swept the line of charging figures. As the beams paused for a moment, the charge would take effect and a ball of fire would mushroom skyward, leaving a dozen seared cat bodies on the ground.

Terrence swept his machine gun along in a swath behind the Bannings, picking off what they left. Some dozen catmen made it to within ten yards of their front but sprawled still or lay kicking briefly until a Greenback put another bullet into him.

The Rumi were gone, withdrawing to the west and Terrence was yelling and cursing at his men to keep them from breaking ranks and following them. Three Riflemen and O'Toole were dead and Sergeant Polasky was coughing out his life beside his Banning with a spring gun bolt in his stomach.

"Those d.a.m.n cats!" he was muttering when O'Mara reached him, "those d.a.m.n cats. We showed 'em, didn't we, Lieutenant? That Banning's a good gun if you...."

They buried the Greenbacks in eight foot graves and the Earthman in a seven foot one. "Those dirty, lousy, stinking...." Bill Fielding was beating his fist into the palm of his hand. "We got one of them alive this time, Terrence. Hannigan knows a little of their lingo. His old man escaped from one of their breeding pens on the other side of the Muddy. He's working him over."

In the twenty odd years that Terrans and Rumi had occupied different halves of the same planet, the number of men who had learned the Rumi language wouldn't have filled a small room. So Terrence was surprised at Bill's information and hurried toward the place where the interrogation was taking place. Before he got there, he heard a piercing cat cry which ended in a gurgle and when he reached the group of Greenbacks, Hannigan was wiping his bayonet on the gra.s.s. He stood looking down at a Rumi officer whose throat was neatly slit from furry ear to furry ear. Then fists clenched on his hips, he confronted his men.

"I don't suppose it ever occurred to you bunch of dimwits that we might have gotten some information out of this guy. He might have talked, you know."

"He talk," grinned Hannigan, "he talk plenty. He feared we might hurt him. We tell him no hurt if he talk.... Ha!"

"He say big flyship down, Mr. Lieutenant," said O'Shaughnessy.

"What? What do you mean?" demanded O'Mara.

"Flyship ... _Sun Maid_ crash in storm.... Rumi find."

"Good G.o.d! The _Sun Maid_!" Terrence gasped, "That storm the first night!"

"They surround and attack Terrans. These ones on way to join attack when meet us," O'Shaughnessy went on.

"He tell where ship down," Hannigan said, "it near bend in Big Muddy ...

place I know. Ten, twenty mile back."

The Greenbacks were watching the Terrans, fingering their bayonets eagerly and hugging their rifles. Terrence had the impression that they were beginning to like their jobs. He turned to Bill Fielding, "Well, Bill, it looks like we came about twenty miles too far."

Bill grinned, "Yep, I guess so. Come on, soldiers, fall in. We got work to do back here a piece."

A two hour's forced march with the sun beating down and the sound of firing growing closer. Only a column of Greenbacks could have done it and only a crazy Irishman would have asked them to. They came up over a rise and looked down a gentle slope toward the brown twisting snake that was the Big Muddy. On its banks lay the broken shape of the airship and swarming across a burned circle around it were Rumi, thousands of them. The firing had slackened in the last few minutes and now they could see why. The Rumi were a.s.saulting and were at close grips with the ring of defending Terrans.

"Now?" questioned O'Shaughnessy, "we fix bayonets now?"

"Yes," replied Terrence, "now we fix bayonets."

At his word three hundred big clumsy hands reached for three hundred bayonets and fixed them to three hundred rifles.

"O'Shea, take O'Toole's squad and stand by up here with the Bannings.

O'Shaughnessy, take the left flank. Bill, you take the right. Let's go!"

There wasn't a sound out of the Rifles as they started down the hill, none of their usual croakings and bellowings, just silence and the heavy thud of their feet. The Rumi had seen them. Many of those in the rear of the attack were swinging about to face them. Spring gun bolts began to whiz in their direction. One or two Narakans fell. They were closer to the struggle now, closer to the tightly packed Rumi and the hand to hand struggle about the _Sun Maid_.

Terrence was firing, throwing lead into the gray-bodied ma.s.s ahead of him but his men were just thundering along with their little black eyes fixed on their old oppressors, bayonets leveled in front of them in approved training school method. They resembled nothing so much as a regiment of tanks hurtling at an enemy. The momentum of their charge carried them half way through the Rumi ranks, the terrific force of the plunging amphibians bowling over the lighter catmen.