“Thought it was a nightmare

Lord, it's all so true

They told me, don't go walking slow

The devil's on the loose…

Over on the mountain, thunder magic spoke,

Let the people know my wisdom,

Fill the land with smoke…

Better run through the jungle,

Better run through the jungle,

Better run through the jungle,

Oh, don't look back to see…”

- Creedence Clearwater Revival

Ven stroked her chin and examined the line of pebbles that Deschane had arranged on the sandy riverbank. Four rose quartz chips were arranged in a short wedge, while pieces of grey pumice stone formed a wide crescent behind it. On the left shoulder of this crescent ran a groove Deschane had dug into the dirt with his fingernail to signify the river Foss. Lt. Shylo’s artillery section was represented by three twigs stuck into a raised mound of dirt at an angle. Behind the crescent was a smaller groove that ran perpendicular to the first—Shogun Creek. Deschane pointed to it as he went over the battle plan:

“We’ll begin the sweep at the confluence of the Foss and Shogun Creek, probing westward till we make contact with the enemy. My platoon will divide into quartets and lead the way about a hundred paces in front of the cavalry,” he touched the quartz chips, “Pvt. Greymoss and myself will form the point of our wedge. The two shoulder cannon teams with their supporting riflemen will be posted on either flank. Harmer, I want your quartet on the right moving ahead of the mobile artillerist. Beans, you’ve got the sulphur grenades—you’ll go with her.”

“That leaves only one quartet for the left flank closer to the river,” Pretty Boy said, noticing the uneven distribution of firepower.

“Yes. They’re the bait,” Deschane said without so much as batting an eyelid. The pathfinders squirmed uncomfortably at that. Not a word was spoken, but it was clear that no one was keen to play the worm on the fisherman’s hook. Ven could sense the growing reluctance in her unit, the resentment at being voluntold for what was clearly becoming a suicidal venture. This was the critical moment, and everyone knew it.

“I’ll go,” Ven found herself saying before common sense could staple her lips shut. Deschane darted a quick yet meaningful glance at the corporal, one that Ven could read like a book.

On one hand he was grateful that someone had stepped up to the challenge, but on the other he was concerned for her safety.

It was no secret that she was his prized protégé and that he was grooming her for command. Though exactly why he had chosen Ven for the role was quite beyond her.

Rene had been a perfectly capable subordinate. And yet Deschane had always treated him like a burden that had been foisted upon him by the officer training school, an upper-class dilettante who couldn’t tell his arse from his elbow and had to be taught everything from the ground up.

Ven supposed that she did have a talent for organization and analysis. But she’d never truly believed that she deserved the confidence Deschane placed in her. Consequently, she was always striving to meet his expectations. Not out of any personal ambition—before the Tallahammock campaign Ven had been perfectly happy pushing quills behind her desk. Her compulsion to excel at her duties was driven solely by her admiration for old Sourface. Ven earnestly believed that Deschane and Rene had together represented the best that the Fleet had to offer.

Intellect and empathy. Decisiveness and obedience. Duty and restraint. Flip sides of the coin, except now one of those faces had been rubbed off forever. What else could Ven do but try and fill that void?

“Aw, shit,” Pretty Boy swore, “Guess I’ll come with.”

“Likewise,” said Tooms, and Cooly nodded his assent. Ven felt more than a little relief at knowing these three had her back. As she’d expected, the others could not stand by while she strode willingly into danger.

The weak right flank was meant to present a welcoming target for the enemy. All signs pointed to the eradicator being an ambush predator that relied on camouflage and which preferred to strike at isolated elements. The pathfinders were to remain in visual contact with each other as much as possible and proceed slowly through the bush, making sure to preserve their formation. The wedge was ideal for presenting maximum firepower and mutually supporting arcs of fire to the front and sides. Once contact was made the platoon was to stand its ground and seek to overcome the eradicator with sheer weight of fire, simultaneously bringing both shoulder cannons to bear.

“And while all this is happening, we are to wait on the sidelines with our thumbs up our bumholes?” muttered Caitliff’s non-com.

“On the contrary, this is where you drakenguard will come in,” Deschane said without missing a beat, “Yours is the most crucial part of this plan. While we pathfinders fix the enemy in place, you manoeuvre around them and prevent its escape,” the navigator indicated the horns of the crescent, “We can’t allow it to withdraw and set up another ambush.”

“I see where you’re going with this,” Captain Caitliff swatted her hat against her knee, “Once the pressure is on, we will not let up!”

“And if it’s impervious to small arms fire?” Lt. Shylo pointed out.

“Then we drakenguard will drive the creature into the open where your twelve-pounders can gobble it up,” Caitliff tapped her riding crop on the twigs on the terrain model, then pointed across the Foss towards a series of wide clearings where the bamboo thickets were sparser.

“There! A salvo of explosive shells at just the right spot would do the trick. Though the timing of it will be tricky.”

The officers turned expectantly to Lt. Shylo.

“You’d be danger close in that case, wouldn’t you?” he protested, “Friendly fire is bound to occur.”

“It’s a risk we’ll have to take,” Deschane said, already standing up to go, “We have to maintain contact, grab the enemy by the belt buckle, so to speak. My man Beans here will signal you with the sulphur grenades. Wherever you see us pop a smoke, give it everything you’ve got.”

“Level the whole goddamned forest if you have to,” Captain Caitliff added with feeling. She stood high in her stirrups and yelled: “Alright, troopers. Let’s show this thing who the real monsters are. Form up and move out!”

As the pathfinders and drakenguard filed into place, Caitliff drew Deschane and Ven aside, saying:

“I couldn’t help but notice that this plan of yours seems awfully familiar, navigator.”

“How so?”

“Don’t play stupid with me,” she snorted, “These are Amit tactics.”

Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

Ven looked back at the diorama and was embarrassed that she hadn’t spotted it sooner. Fleet tacticians called the formation the Maw. With it the Amits had eviscerated entire armies of riflemen, nullifying the advantages of their technologically superior foes.

A strong centre was the key. This was normally composed of bulls and fully matured warrior-brood. They occupied the bulk of the human forces with fierce frontal assaults, fixing them in place while the Maw’s mandibles closed in from either side. These were swift-moving columns of worker-brood or juvenile warriors whose thinner, less armoured exoskeletons allowed them to cover great distances with alarming speed. They slipped around the sides of the human gunlines, using superior numbers to swarm the regiments from all directions and cut them apart piecemeal. Like everything else about that troglodytic race, it was simple, brutish, yet undeniably effective. Deschane had replicated it down to the last detail, substituting human units in to fulfil the roles of specific Amit broods.

“This enemy cannot be fought with conventional means,” Deschane repeated, “Today, we are the primitives and they are species favoured by evolution.”

“Well, I wouldn’t say they hold all the advantages. Your people seem to have come very well prepared for this eventuality. I’ve never seen stretcher bearers outfitted with custom quicktimers and cycler pistols galore. Navigator, somehow I can’t shake the feeling that you know far more than you are letting on. Why is your platoon really here?”

“To serve the species, skipper,” Deschane said, and Ven could almost hear the smile in his voice.

“We’ll see about that. Keep your secrets, then. I’ll have the truth out of you one way or another.”

“Is that a threat?”

“No,” the captain said, climbing back into her saddle, “A promise. Don’t foul this up, Deschane. Our lives depend on you.”

Caitliff jerked the reigns and her hornblower sprang away to join the others.

#

Shogun Creek turned out to be a muddy little rivulet that came up to their ankles. The pathfinders put it at their backs and split into quartets, spacing themselves out with equal intervals of five paces between each trooper. They had to maintain visual contact with their neighbours at all times, which slowed their progress through the bush to a snail’s crawl.

Greymoss glided ahead of them, his brown grass poncho blending perfectly into the undergrowth. He set a leisurely pace as he cut for sign, beginning with the spot where the riders had been taken. Blood and bits of innards speckled the fronds, and Ven nearly trod upon a severed thumb.

“Someone gottem. Lookit, over here,” Greymoss pointed at a shrapnel-ridden trunk of a foxtail where a patch of yellowish-green mucus clung to the underside of a bough. The bog-man reached up with his Sharpstone rifle and got a bit of it on his bayonet, then held it out for the navigator to examine.

“So they bleed,” Deschane said, rubbing it thoughtfully between his fingers, “Good…”

Greymoss found deep indentations in the mud nearby. He stood a while tugging at his beard before deducing that the creature had only two clawed toes on each foot, but that it travelled on six legs.

“He a heavy sumbitch, too,” Greymoss added, “Two and a half, three tons. Lotta armour, ah s’pose.”

“Can you find him?” Deschane asked.

“Does a tapir shit inna woods?” Greymoss grunted rhetorically.

Behind them they could hear the flutter of the hornblowers as the drakenguard followed after them. They followed a meandering trail of yellow-green goo across the leaf litter till it petered out, then picked it up again among the lower branches. Despite the creature’s incredible bulk, apparently it could still climb. What’s more, it seemed to traverse the canopy with as much ease it did on the ground. Long parallel scratches bleeding resin marked where it had distributed its weight among several trees at once.

Suddenly the trail of mucus petered out completely. Either the wound had clotted up quickly or the eradicator had treated it himself. Greymoss became pensive, chewing on the ends of his beard and muttering to himself in his pidgin dialect.

The platoon had entered a segment of the bush where the creepers grew so lush and thick that the only way to advance was to hack out a path with a machete. They took turns at it, three soldiers of each quartet standing ready with their rifles while a fourth sweated and chopped away at the unyielding vines. The vegetation was so thick they could barely move a meter every half hour. Visibility was almost non-existent.

“I can barely see what’s in front of my nose,” Tooms complained as he flexed his aching wrists, “How exactly are we supposed to find this creature?”

“It’s supposed to find us, genius,” Cooly reminded him, “And the more you keep bitching, the sooner it will.”

“This’d go a lot faster if we travelled in file,” Tooms said only five minutes later, “I bet Greymoss could find us a way through all this that don’t involve this arse-breaking work.”

“I’ll break your arse with my foot if you don’t stop yakking,” Pretty Boy threatened, “It’s bad enough our tracker is losing his marbles without you adding onto it.”

“Who, Greymoss? That man doesn’t know the meaning of fear,” Ven said.

“Can’t you hear him? He’s talking gibberish to himself.”

“Isn’t he always?” Tooms muttered in between strokes of his machete. Pretty Boy drew Ven aside, said: “Tooms has a point. We can’t make any headway moving like this, and the brush is breaking up our formation. Go ask Deschane if he’ll consider us moving in file.”

Ven glanced at the central quartet and saw Deschane at Greymoss’ shoulder, the pair of them standing still as if transfixed. She drifted close enough to overhear the bog-man’s running monologue:

“…yeller cheesewood, rambutan, crepe-myrtle, cananga…”

“Navigator?” Ven hissed, “Could I have a word?”

“He’s onto something,” Deschane shushed her with a gesture, then whispered to Greymoss, “What’s wrong?”

“Dem flours,” Greymoss told them without taking his eyes off the foreground.

“Flours?” Deschane was confused.

“Ayuh. Deys in bloom.”

“Oh, you mean the flowers,” Ven almost burst out laughing. Sometimes she thought Greymoss only grew more incomprehensible as the years went by, “Yes, I imagine they are. It’s early in the rainy season after all.”

For the first time in a while Ven allowed herself to sit back take in the scenery. A long day’s march had a way of wearing down one’s appreciation for nature’s bounty, but seeing it now Ven was reminded that this world could be remarkably breathtaking when it cared to be.

Shy petals of cacauate and lunar orchid pushed up from the sable darkness of the jungle floor, hinting at a hidden realm of beauty behind the leafy veil. Branches laden with early jungle fruit hung heavy with swarms of berry-berry bats, the nocturnal furballs chittering grumpily as the machete-men crashed their way through the vegetation. Monarch butterflies alighted upon a fallen tree trunk overgrown with pale toadstools and polka dot splotches of lichen.

As pretty as all this was, Ven had to remind herself that they were interlopers here. Her trained eyes picked out murderhole spiders the size of her head spying on the bats from the caves they had dug into the mud below.

That was Arachnea in a nutshell. Amidst the glory of creation, death came in a thousand forms. Though at the moment she could not discern what exactly had rattled Greymoss.

“White lauan, pili, narra. Ayuh,” Greymoss said with growing confidence, “It do be.”

“Speak clearly, damn you,” Deschane grumbled.

“See that narra?” the bog-man whispered, nodding at a timber tree with bright minty leaves some twenty paces away, “Ought to be yellow flours all over it this time of year, fo-shurr-aye. Only, there ain’t. Savvy?”

Ven savvied just fine, as did Deschane. Though she wouldn’t have noticed if the bog-man hadn’t pointed it out for them: the narra was the only tree in the area that was shorn of its buds. Now his grumblings made sense: Greymoss had simply been listing the species of flowering species native to these hinterlands.

The navigator drew a pistol with one hand and with the other ripped out a series of hand signals that the other quartets saw and passed down the line. The crash and thwack of the machetes stopped as pathfinders inverted their formation into a V.

On the left Sierck ambled up with his shoulder cannon and took position with his loader and supporting riflemen, while on the right Cooly did the same, their arcs of fire overlapping on the point which Deschane had wordlessly indicated.

With a glance to either side to check that they were all in position, the navigator aimed his cycler with deliberate slowness, its barrel pointing like an accusing finger at the narra as if he were calling its bluff. The rest of the pathfinders followed suit, triggers curling gently round their triggers.

Silence fell over them in an invisible shroud. Even the bats had ceased to chitter. The cycler cracked like a bullwhip, the bullet pulping into the young wood with a spatter of mint-green sap.

A moment went by, then two. But the narra never budged. Deschane let out a huff through his valves and began reloading the empty chamber of his pistol. Slowly everyone relaxed or sat up with chuckles of nervous relief.

“You really had us going there,” Pretty Boy called over.

“Ayuh,” Greymoss said apologetically, “T'were nuthin after all.”

The tracker took a step forward then stopped, cocking his head to one side in apparent puzzlement. Then he staggered back with a curse, firing his Sharpstone from the hip as he yelled incoherently:

“It do be! It do be!”

Before their very eyes the narra seemed to burst asunder, the pieces reconfiguring themselves into a tall and spindly creature of awkward proportions. Greymoss fell on his back just as its boughs flicked out towards him, slicing through the intervening wall of vines and saplings like grain before the scythe. Greymoss quite suddenly found himself in possession of only half a rifle—the top section of the barrel had been shaved off more cleanly than if it had been done with a pipe cutter and a file. The bog-man sat on his arse and goggled at the eradicator like the rest of them were doing. The creature reared up to its full height on four gangly legs, the segments of bark it wore on its parchment-brown exoskeleton sloughing off like dead skin. It had a long, thick abdomen joined to a narrow thorax from which emerged two spiked, raptorial forelegs decorated with leafy branches. These closed switchblade-like over serrated interior swords, each tooth as black and sharp as an obsidian knife. An isosceles triangle head with lidless, glass bottle eyes on the opposite corners stared back at them. It folded its switchblade arms together up in front of its threshing mouthparts as if it wished to challenge them to a round of fisticuffs.

For a moment the utter surrealness of its movements lulled them all in a trance.

“That’s funny,” Leming muttered, “Why, it almost looks like it’s praying for something.”

Deschane was the first to recover. He seized Greymoss by the armpit and hauled him back behind the line, firing his cycler pistol with his spare hand.

“Contact front!” he shouted as the creature came skittering towards them with preternatural agility, swords flaring open to enfold them all.