He’d chosen his kill zone because the valley was the broadest opening through a tortuous east-west ridge line, the most logical avenue for the natives’ advance southward, and the wave of Medusans flowed towards it, exactly as he’d hoped. They began to funnel together as they entered its northern end, and he checked his deployments one last time.

An awful lot of his plan was built around Third Platoon’s battle armor, and he wished he’d been able to bring O’Brian’s squad back to thicken his lines. But he couldn’t. He needed that power source checked before anyone there could bug out. That was all there was to it, yet it left Kilgore’s platoon spread mighty thin. His squad of heavy armor formed the stopper at the southern end of the valley, as well as Papadapolous’s heaviest single fire unit. They should be well able to take care of themselves, particularly with the support of Sergeant Howell’s heavy weapons section and the turret mounts of Isvarian’s grounded skimmers, but that left Kilgore only one squad of scouts to watch over the Stilties’ advance and cover both flanks, and that was nowhere near enough for the captain’s peace of mind.

He heard angry voices behind him, one of them the shrill whine of Fearless’s senior physician, and then what might have been the sound of a blow, but he tuned them out to concentrate on more important things. The scouts were withdrawing up the sides of the valley now, bouncing from cover to cover in their jump gear, and he gnawed his lower lip as he watched them.

He wasn’t worried about his battle-armored people, but the rest of his troops were in standard body armor, and the NPA company Major Isvarian had brought in to flesh out his people were even more lightly protected. He had no doubt his weapons could turn that valley into a slaughterhouse, yet even with air support that many enemies might manage to break at least some of their number out of the zone. It seemed preposterous in the face of modern weaponry. Every manual he’d ever read, every lecture he’d ever heard, said ill-armed aborigines could never break through that much state-of-the-art firepower. But the manuals and lectures had never contemplated facing a horde like this precisely because modern killing power made such a concentrated body of troops suicidal. That meant he didn’t have any real way to estimate how much fire the Medusans—especially if they were all on mekoha—could absorb without breaking, and he’d have only a single section of armored scouts on each flank to intercept them. If they were hopped up enough to keep coming, if they got in among his lightly armored people in any numbers…

“Keep a close eye on the flanks, Gunny,” he told Jenkins softly, and turned to his Navy channel. “Hawk-One, Falcon Leader. Watch the slopes. If we get a breakout, I want you on it in a hurry.”

“Hawk-One copies, Falcon Leader,” Ensign Tremaine replied. “We’ll watch your flanks.”