Every sergeant tried to report in at once. The Skorpis were attacking around half the perimeter, charging forward into our guns.

And then they were hitting my sector, too. They came rushing out of the woods, firing and bellowing earsplitting battle cries. I grabbed my rifle and started shooting back. They were big, I could see that even at this distance, huge and heavily muscled with cat’s eyes that glowed fiercely in the light of the battle.

I ducked down for a moment and worked the antimissile override controls on my wrist. Depressing the lasers to fire horizontally, I started them sweeping the woods with their heavy beams. My troops knew enough to keep down, stay flattened on the ground. The Skorpis walked into those powerful beams as they advanced. I saw them sliced in half, heads vaporized, trees blasted into flame. They dropped down to their bellies; their advance stopped.

We peppered them with our grenades. I saw white-hot shrapnel shredding the ground were they lay. But they did not retreat. They inched toward us, crawling on their bellies, dying and being horribly torn up by our fire but still coming at us, inexorably, relentlessly, like an unstoppable tide.

And the alarm on my other wrist tingled. Glancing to my left I saw that the automated laser rifles in the gully had found something to shoot at. Whole squads of Skorpis were slithering down the gully, just as I thought they would. The attacks on our perimeter were merely holding actions designed to keep our attention away from the gully.

Merely holding actions. Humans and Skorpis were dying all along our perimeter. The forest was in flames now. Rockets whizzed through the scorching air. Explosions shook the ground. Laser beams flicked and winked everywhere in a crazy crossfire. Men yelled and screamed at the enemy, who bellowed and roared back at us.

And the main weight of their attack was slithering down the gully. They were past the screen of automated rifles now, thinking that they had put the gully’s defenders to rout. They were moving faster now, crawling on their hands and knees, almost to the point where Manfred and his ten would have to stop them.