Voyage Across the Stars by David Drake

Author:David Drake
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Science Fiction, Fiction, Space Opera, Adventure, General
Publisher: Baen
Published: 2012-01-02T05:00:00+00:00

Crewmen had carried minifloods from the Swift to throw blue-white light over the bodies. Elongated shadows made the Spiders look even larger than they were. Most of the creatures had slid to the base of the cone in their death throes, but a few lay nearly at the rim.

“We never killed that many of them,” said a marveling colonist.

“I never saw this many Spiders!” said Jon Watford. “In thirty-two years, I never saw this many Spiders. You’re—”

He turned to Lissea Doormann. “Lissea, you’re incredible, you and your men. It’ll be a generation before they get up enough strength to be a problem again.”

“I’m afraid your dress is a casualty, though, Mellie,” Lissea said.

She looked down at herself ruefully. She’d dropped a bandolier over the garment as she left the Civic Hall at a run. A clasp had caught and torn the light fabric. The black smudges were iridium. The metal sublimed from powergun bores as they channeled the enormous energy downrange and redeposited on whatever was closest when the vapor cooled. Lissea’s hands and the bare skin of her throat beneath the line of her visor were gray-tinged also.

Mellie, still in her own peach frock, hugged Lissea fiercely. “Don’t worry about that!” she said. “What’s important is that you’re all right.”

“Silly bastards thought they’d sneak up on us,” Deke Warson said. The cloth facing of his hard body armor was abraded. At some point during the night, Deke must have skidded ten or twenty meters on the lava. “Because we didn’t shoot the first time one of them poked his head out, they thought we didn’t know they were coming.”

“If that’s what passes for fire discipline on Ajax Four. . .” his brother said. He spoke in Watford’s direction, but he didn’t raise his voice to emphasize the criticism, “. . . then I’m surprised there’s any colonies left.”

Virtually the whole Quantock settlement was present oohing and aahing at the windrow of huge bodies. The trucks that brought the reaction force had returned to ferry civilians. Parents carried babies to see the unique sight.

“And there’s more back there along the cliffs,” a colonist said. “I don’t know how many there must be.”

“There were half a dozen Spiders on the corniche,” Tadziki said to Ned in a quiet voice. “They were going to ambush whoever came from the settlement.”

The older man shook his head at the memory. “It was as though they’d never heard of thermal imaging,” he said. “Or maybe they’d just never met humans who could hit anything from a moving vehicle. They scarcely got a shot off, the Spiders.”

“They come up two of the gullies south of us and spread all around,” said Harlow, a skeletally thin man whose skin was as pigmentless as an albino’s. He had red hair. “We could see them like it was in broad daylight. We just waited till we figured we could make the bag limit.”

“Amateurs,” Tadziki said as he studied his hands. Like those of the other mercs, they were stained by redeposited metal.

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