“Thanks, Hawk-One.” He returned his attention to his map display as the light codes of hostiles began to flow into the valley. Another fifteen minutes, he thought.

Lieutenant Liam Kilgore watched his armor display with one eye while he checked his pulse rifle with the other. His scouts had done their first job by spotting the Stilties, then fallen back before them without being spotted in return. Now it was time for them to get the hell out of the way and get ready to kick some ass, and he grunted approval as they filtered neatly back into the positions he’d selected in such haste. His armored people were supposed to intercept any Stilty breakouts and stop them short of the less well-protected types behind them, but there were an awful lot of hostiles out there. He wished O’Brian’s squad was with him to help thicken the flanks, but even if O’Brian had been there, it wouldn’t have thickened them enough. Still, if there were a lot of Stilties, there was also a lot of firepower on the ridges above his people. Maybe even enough.

Jesus, there were a lot of the bastards! More and more of them flowed forward, and he no longer needed his armor sensors to see them. The mark-one eyeball worked just fine, for the nomads weren’t even trying to hide. Their vaunted skill in concealed movement seemed to have deserted them, and his audio sensors picked up the high, shrill sounds of some barbaric chant as they forged ahead with their weird, swinging gait. Perhaps half of them were cavalry, mounted on jehrns, the odd, upright riding beasts of the northern hemisphere nomads; the rest were on foot, and all of them advanced waving rifles, swords, and spears—even clubs—and screaming encouragement to one another. There were actually bayonets on most of those rifles, and there was something peculiarly bloodcurdling about the Medusans’ frenzied sounds and obvious unconcern for anything they might run into. Kilgore almost imagined he could smell the acrid stench of mekoha wafting from them, and the thought of fighting someone who couldn’t even feel pain, much less fear, wasn’t one Marines were accustomed to.

On the other hand, he told himself grimly, the Stilties weren’t accustomed to facing modern firepower, either. They were in for a shock, and—

“Falcon Leader to all Falcons. Engage!” a voice snapped, and Kilgore’s pulse rifle swung up into position without conscious thought. His thumb snapped the selector to full-auto, not the normal semi-automatic, and his little finger pressed the stud that selected the explosive magazine. He paused for one bare heartbeat, seeing the mob of Medusans through cold, suddenly distant eyes, and then he squeezed the trigger.

It wasn’t a slaughter. It was worse than that. The Medusans had never heard of dispersion; they were packed shoulder-to-shoulder, crowded into a single, huge target. Anything that missed one of them was bound to hit another.

Kilgore’s pulse rifle surged back, its recoil almost imperceptible through his armor as its small, powerful grav coil spat a stream of four-millimeter darts down-range. The explosions of the darts weren’t the clean, white flashes of practice on the range; they were red and steaming as Medusan bodies blew apart in geysers of blood. He swept his fire across the shrieking natives, emptying a full hundred-round extended magazine into them in less than twenty seconds, and his was only one of almost three hundred modern rifles flaying that screaming thong.