"Sir, you don't want to be standing there if a beehive bursts," a private behind the sandbag wall filling one of the arched windows called to him, referring to the flechette-filled antipersonnel rounds fired by larger guns.
The Cat stood, anxious and upset, listening to the night. There was a droning in the sky, faint but growing. Suddenly he knew why he was anxious. The chills...
"Reapers!" Valentine shouted to the men on the rooftop. "Reaper alarm!"
The sentry froze for a moment, as if Valentine were shouting up to him in a foreign tongue, then went to the cylinder of steel hanging from a hook on the loudspeaker pole atop the building. He inserted a metal rod and rang the gong for all it was worth. Valentine picked up the field phone just inside the headquarters entrance and pushed the button to buzz the com center.
"Operator," the center answered. Another star shell lit up the hilltop, creating crossing shadows with the still-burning earlier one.
"This is Major Valentine. Reaper alarm." He heard the woman gasp, then she repeated the message with her hand over the mouthpiece.
"Captain Styachowski acknowledges, thank you," came the flat response.
Ahn-Kha appeared in the doorway behind him, a golden-haired djinn summoned by the clanging alarm. He had a Grog gun in his arm and a Quickwood stabbing spear between his teeth. A second spear was tucked under his arm.
"This is going-" Valentine began, then shut up as he saw what was coming from the east. In the glare of the star shell, he saw a little two-engined turboprop, the kind used by pre-2022 airlines to hop a few passengers between small cities, roar into the light at a hundred feet. The rear door was open.
"What the fuck?" one of the soldiers on the roof said, watching. A figure plunged from the plane, trailing a cathedral train of material that whipped and flapped in the air as it fell. A parachute that failed to open? A second one followed it, and a third, all with the same flagellate fabric acting as a drogue for the plunging man-figures. Valentine saw
another plane behind, a different make, this one coming for him like a missile aimed at his position, its daring pilot almost touching the treetops.
"Your shoulder, my David," Ahn-Kha said, as Valentine felt the barrel of the Grog gun fall against his shoulder. Valentine froze, a human bipod.
"Nu," Ahn-Kha said, and the gun jumped on Valentine's shoulder as the Grog fired.
The boom of the .50 echoed in the hallway. The plane reacted, tipping its wings to the side. At that height there was no room for error; the plane veered into the treetops. It roared through them to the music of snapping wood, then struck a thicker bole and pancaked. Exploding aviation fuel flamed yellow-orange in the night.
"Good shot," Valentine said, hardly believing his eyes.
"Good luck," Ahn-Kha returned. "I guessed to which side the driver sat."
The star shells lit up the first figure's landing in white light and black shadow. It hit the ground running, shrugging off the drapes of fabric attached to it. Only a Reaper could survive such a landing with bones intact... as did the next, and the next, striking earth to the sound of clanging alarm gongs.
Valentine watched, transfixed, and his "Valentingle" told him where the others were. To the west. Climbing the sheer face of the quarry, the one part of the hill almost un-climbable and therefore almost unguarded. He took one of Ahn-Kha's spears.
God, two were headed for the hospital.
"Ahn-Kha, get the Bears!" he shouted, hurrying toward the hospital building. He ran past the old stable building mat now housed the dairy herd. He paused in his race and threw open one of the barn doors. If these were the "unguided" sapper Reapers, they might be drawn to the heat and blood of a cow more man a lighter human.
A Reaper ran across the hillside, leaping from fallen tree to earthen mound like a child hopping puddles, making for the hospital.
"You! You!" Valentine shouted, waving his arms.
It turned, hissing, face full of malice, eyes cold and fixed as a stuffed snake's. It squatted, and Valentine braced himself for the leap.
Tracer cut across his vision like fireflies on Benzedrine. Men in a hidden machine-gun nest, covering the open ground between the buildings and the artillery pits, caught the Reaper across the side. It tumbled, closing its legs like a falling spider, and rose dragging a leg.
Valentine was there in two Cat leaps, but he must have looked too much like a jumping Reaper to the machine-gun crew. Bullets zipped around him. Valentine dropped to the ground.
The Reaper staggered toward him, one side of its body recalcitrant, like that of a stroke victim learning to use his worse-off half again. Valentine heard screams from the machine gunners: a Reaper was among them.
He rose, spear ready, and realized that once he used Ahn-Kha's point, he'd be unarmed. The nearest weapon was with the machine-gun crew, now dying under the claws of a sapper. Valentine ran for their gun pit, pursued by the half-leaping, half-staggering stride of the shot-up one.
The Reaper in the gun pit was feeding, back to him. Valentine jumped from ten feet away, landed atop its back and buried the Quickwood in its collarbone. The beast never knew what hit it; the Quickwood sank into the muscle at the base of its neck before the handle snapped off. Valentine's body blow knocked it flat. It stiffened, legs kicking and hands pulling up fistfuls of earth in black-nailed claws.
Valentine ignored the bloody ruin of the soldiers in the machine-gun nest, noting only that one was a promising soldier named Ralston, who'd qualified at the bottom in marksmanship with his rifle, but when given a tripod and the sliding sights on a Squad Support Gun, came to the head of the class with his accurate grouping. He tore the machine gun from Ralston's limp fingers and fired it in time to see the flash reflected in the eyes of the oncoming Reaper, lit up in the gun's strobe light of muzzle flash as it came toward him. The 7.62mm bullets tore through even the Reaper cloth, blasting back the staggering nightmare into a jigsaw cutout of tarry flesh and broken bone. What was left of the thing rolled around aimlessly, clawing at and opening its wounds in search of the burning pain within, a scorpion stinging itself to death.
He opened the gun, put a new ammunition box on the side, let loose the tripod catch, and ran for the hospital.