by Joe Haldeman
“I’m not taking orders, I’m giv—”
“You wouldn’t last ten seconds up there,” Charlie said.
“I’ll take the same chance as everybody else.”
“Don’t you hear what I’m saying? They’ll kill you!”
“The troops? Nonsense. I know they don’t like me especially, but—”
“You haven’t listened in on the squad frequencies?” No, they didn’t speak my brand of English when they talked among themselves. “They think you put them out on the line for punishment, for cowardice. After you’d told them anyone was free to go into the dome.”
“Didn’t you, sir?” Hilleboe said.
“To punish them? No, of course not.” Not consciously. “They were just up there when I needed…Hasn’t Lieutenant Brill said anything to them?”
“Not that I’ve heard,” Charlie said. “Maybe she’s been too busy to tune in.”
Or she agreed with them. “I’d better get—”
“There!” Hilleboe shouted. The first enemy ship was visible in one of the minefield monitors; the others appeared in the next second. They came in from random directions and weren’t evenly distributed around the base. Five in the northeast quadrant and only one in the southwest. I relayed the information to Brill.
But we had predicted their logic pretty well; all of them were coming down in the ring of mines. One came close enough to one of the tachyon devices to set it off. The blast caught the rear end of the oddly streamlined craft, causing it to make a complete flip and crash nose-first. Side ports opened up and Taurans came crawling out. Twelve of them; probably four left inside. If all the others had sixteen as well, there were only slightly more of them than of us.
In the first wave.
The other seven had landed without incident, and yes, there were sixteen each. Brill shuffled a couple of squads to conform to the enemy’s troop concentration, and she waited.
They moved fast across the minefield, striding in unison like bowlegged, top-heavy robots, not even breaking stride when one of them was blown to bits by a mine, which happened eleven times.
When they came over the horizon, the reason for their apparently random distribution was obvious: they had analyzed beforehand which approaches would give them the most natural cover, from the rubble that the drones had kicked up. They would be able to get within a couple of kilometers of the base before we got any clear line-of-sight of them. And their suits had augmentation circuits similar to ours, so they could cover a kilometer in less than a minute.
Brill had her troops open fire immediately, probably more for morale than out of any hope of actually hitting the enemy. They probably were getting a few, though it was hard to tell. At least the tachyon rockets did an impressive job of turning boulders into gravel.
The Taurans returned fire with some weapon similar to the tachyon rocket, maybe exactly the same. They rarely found a mark, though; our people were at and below ground level, and if the rocket didn’t hit something, it would keep going on forever, amen. They did score a hit on one of the gigawatt lasers, though, and the concussion that filtered down to us was strong enough to make me wish we had burrowed a little deeper than twenty meters.
The gigawatts weren’t doing us any good. The Taurans must have figured out the lines of sight ahead of time, and gave them wide berth. That turned out to be fortunate, because it caused Charlie to let his attention wander from the laser monitors for a moment.
“What the hell?”
“What’s that, Charlie?” I didn’t take my eyes off the monitors. Waiting for something to happen.
“The ship, the cruiser—it’s gone.” I looked at the holograph display. He was right; the only red lights were those that stood for the troop carriers.
“Where did it go?” I asked inanely.
“Let’s play it back.” He programmed the display to go back a couple of minutes and cranked out the scale to where both planet and collapsar showed on the cube. The cruiser showed up, and with it, three green dots. Our “coward,” attacking the cruiser with only two drones.
But he had a little help from the laws of physics.
Instead of going into collapsar insertion, he had skimmed around the collapsar field in a slingshot orbit. He had come out going nine-tenths of the speed of light; the drones were going .99c, headed straight for the enemy cruiser. Our planet was about a thousand light-seconds from the collapsar, so the Tauran ship had only ten seconds to detect and stop both drones. And at that speed, it didn’t matter whether you’d been hit by a nova bomb or a spitball.
The first drone disintegrated the cruiser, and the other one, .01 second behind, glided on down to impact on the planet. The fighter missed the planet by a couple of hundred kilometers and hurtled on into space, decelerating with the maximum twenty-five gees. He’d be back in a couple of months.
But the Taurans weren’t going to wait. They were getting close enough to our lines for both sides to start using lasers, but they were also within easy grenade range. A good-size rock could shield them from laser fire, but the grenades and rockets were slaughtering them.
At first, Brill’s troops had the overwhelming advantage; fighting from ditches, they could only be harmed by an occasional lucky shot or an extremely well-aimed grenade (which the Taurans threw by hand, with a range of several hundred meters). Brill had lost four, but it looked as if the Tauran force was down to less than half its original size.
Eventually, the landscape had been torn up enough so that the bulk of the Tauran force was able to fight from holes in the ground. The fighting slowed down to individual laser duels, punctuated occasionally by heavier weapons. But it wasn’t smart to use up a tachyon rocket against a single Tauran, not with another force of unknown size only a few minutes away.
Something had been bothering me about that holographic replay. Now, with the battle’s lull, I knew what it was.
When that second drone crashed at near-lightspeed, how much damage had it done to the planet? I stepped over to the computer and punched it up; found out how much energy had been released in the collision, and then compared it with geological information in the computer’s memory.
Twenty times as much energy as the most powerful earthquake ever recorded. On a planet three-quarters the size of Earth.
On the general frequency: “Everybody—topside! Right now!” I palmed the button that would cycle and open the airlock and tunnel that led from Administration to the surface.
“What the hell, Will—”
“Earthquake!” How long? “Move!”
Hilleboe and Charlie were right behind me. The cat was sitting on my desk, licking himself unconcernedly. I had an irrational impulse to put him inside my suit, which was the way he’d been carried from the ship to the base, but knew he wouldn’t tolerate more than a few minutes of it. Then I had the more reasonable impulse to simply vaporize him with my laser-finger, but by then the door was closed and we were swarming up the ladder. All the way up, and for some time afterward, I was haunted by the image of that helpless animal, trapped under tons of rubble, dying slowly as the air hissed away.
“Safer in the ditches?” Charlie said.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Never been in an earthquake.” Maybe the walls of the ditch would close up and crush us.
I was surprised at how dark it was on the surface. S Doradus had almost set; the monitors had compensated for the low light level.
An enemy laser raked across the clearing to our left, making a quick shower of sparks when it flicked by a gigawatt mounting. We hadn’t been seen yet. We all decided yes, it would be safer in the ditches, and made it to the nearest one in three strides.
There were four men and women in the ditch, one of them badly wounded or dead. We scrambled down the ledge and I turned up my image amplifier to log two, to inspect our ditchmates. We were lucky; one was a grenadier and they also had a rocket launcher. I could just make out the names on their helmets. We were in Brill’s ditch, but she hadn’t noticed us
yet. She was at the opposite end, cautiously peering over the edge, directing two squads in a flanking movement. When they were safely in position, she ducked back down. “Is that you, Major?”
“That’s right,” I said cautiously. I wondered whether any of the people in the ditch were among the ones after my scalp.
“What’s this about an earthquake?”
She had been told about the cruiser being destroyed, but not about the other drone. I explained in as few words as possible.
“Nobody’s come out of the airlock,” she said. “Not yet. I guess they all went into the stasis field.”
“Yeah, they were just as close to one as the other.” Maybe some of them were still down below, hadn’t taken my warning seriously. I chinned the general frequency to check, and then all hell broke loose.
The ground dropped away and then flexed back up; slammed us so hard that we were airborne, tumbling out of the ditch. We flew several meters, going high enough to see the pattern of bright orange and yellow ovals, the craters where nova bombs had been stopped. I landed on my feet but the ground was shifting and slithering so much that it was impossible to stay upright.
With a basso grinding I could feel through my suit, the cleared area above our base crumbled and fell in. Part of the stasis field’s underside was exposed when the ground subsided; it settled to its new level with aloof grace.
Well, minus one cat. I hoped everybody else had time and sense enough to get under the dome.
A figure came staggering out of the ditch nearest to me and I realized with a start that it wasn’t human. At that range, my laser burned a hole straight through his helmet; he took two steps and fell over backward. Another helmet peered over the edge of the ditch. I sheared the top of it off before he could raise his weapon.
I couldn’t get my bearings. The only thing that hadn’t changed was the stasis dome, and it looked the same from any angle. The gigawatt lasers were all buried, but one of them had switched on, a brilliant flickering searchlight that illuminated a swirling cloud of vaporized rock.
Obviously, though, I was in enemy territory. I started across the trembling ground toward the dome.
I couldn’t raise any platoon leaders. All of them but Brill were probably inside the dome. I did get Hilleboe and Charlie; told Hilleboe to go inside the dome and roust everybody out. If the next wave also had 128, we were going to need everybody.
The tremors died down and I found my way into a “friendly” ditch—the cooks’ ditch, in fact, since the only people there were Orban and Rudkoski.
“Looks like you’ll have to start from scratch again, Private.”
“That’s all right, sir. Liver needed a rest.”
I got a beep from Hilleboe and chinned her on. “Sir…there were only ten people there. The rest didn’t make it.”
“They stayed behind?” Seemed like they’d had plenty of time.
“I don’t know, sir.”
“Never mind. Get me a count, how many people we have, all totaled.” I tried the platoon leaders’ frequency again and it was still silent.
The three of us watched for enemy laser fire for a couple of minutes, but there was none. Probably waiting for reinforcements.
Hilleboe called back. “I only get fifty-three, sir. Some may be unconscious.”
“All right. Have them sit tight until—” Then the second wave showed up, the troop carriers roaring over the horizon with their jets pointed our way, decelerating. “Get some rockets on those bastards!” Hilleboe yelled to everyone in particular. But nobody had managed to stay attached to a rocket launcher while he was being tossed around. No grenade launchers, either, and the range was too far for the hand lasers to do any damage.
These carriers were four or five times the size of the ones in the first wave. One of them grounded about a kilometer in front of us, barely stopping long enough to disgorge its troops. Of which there were over 50, probably 64—times 8 made 512. No way we could hold them back.
“Everybody listen, this is Major Mandella.” I tried to keep my voice even and quiet. “We’re going to retreat back into the dome, quickly but in an orderly way. I know we’re scattered all over hell. If you belong to the second or fourth platoon, stay put for a minute and give covering fire while the first and third platoons, and support, fall back.
“First and third and support, fall back to about half your present distance from the dome, then take cover and defend the second and fourth as they come back. They’ll go to the edge of the dome and cover you while you come back the rest of the way.” I shouldn’t have said “retreat”; that word wasn’t in the book. Retrograde action.
There was a lot more retrograde than action. Eight or nine people were firing, and all the rest were in full flight. Rudkoski and Orban had vanished. I took a few carefully aimed shots, to no great effect, then ran down to the other end of the ditch, climbed out and headed for the dome.
The Taurans started firing rockets, but most of them seemed to be going too high. I saw two of us get blown away before I got to my halfway point; found a nice big rock and hid behind it. I peeked out and decided that only two or three of the Taurans were close enough to be even remotely possible laser targets, and the better part of valor would be in not drawing unnecessary attention to myself. I ran the rest of the way to the edge of the field and stopped to return fire. After a couple of shots, I realized that I was just making myself a target; as far as I could see there was only one other person who was still running toward the dome.
A rocket zipped by, so close I could have touched it. I flexed my knees and kicked, and entered the dome in a rather undignified posture.
Thirty-four
Inside, I could see the rocket that had missed me drifting lazily through the gloom, rising slightly as it passed through to the other side of the dome. It would vaporize the instant it came out the other side, since all of the kinetic energy it had lost in abruptly slowing down to 16.3 meters per second would come back in the form of heat.
Nine people were lying dead, facedown just inside of the field’s edge. It wasn’t unexpected, though it wasn’t the sort of thing you were supposed to tell the troops.
Their fighting suits were intact—otherwise they wouldn’t have made it this far—but sometime during the past few minutes’ rough-and-tumble, they had damaged the coating of special insulation that protected them from the stasis field. So as soon as they entered the field, all electrical activity in their bodies ceased, which killed them instantly. Also, since no molecule in their bodies could move faster than 16.3 meters per second, they instantly froze solid, their body temperature stabilized at a cool 0.426 degrees Absolute.
I decided not to turn any of them over to find out their names, not yet. We had to get some sort of defensive position worked out before the Taurans came through the dome. If they decided to slug it out rather than wait.
With elaborate gestures, I managed to get everybody collected in the center of the field, under the fighter’s tail, where the weapons were racked.
There were plenty of weapons, since we had been prepared to outfit three times this number of people. After giving each person a shield and short-sword, I traced a question in the snow:
Good Archers?
Raise hands.
I got five volunteers, then picked out three more so that all the bows would be in use. Twenty arrows per bow. They were the most effective long-range weapons we had; the arrows were almost invisible in their slow flight, heavily weighted and tipped with a deadly sliver of diamond-hard crystal.
I arranged the archers in a circle around the fighter (its landing fins would give them partial protection from missiles coming in from behind) and between each pair of archers put four other people: two spear-throwers, one quarterstaff, and a person armed with a battle-ax and a dozen throwing knives. This arrangement would theoretically take care of the enemy at any range, from the edge of the field to hand-to-hand combat.
Actually, at some 600-to-42 odds, they could probably wa
lk in with a rock in each hand, no shields or special weapons, and still beat the shit out of us.
Assuming they knew what the stasis field was. Their technology seemed up to date in all other respects.
For several hours nothing happened. We got about as bored as anyone could, waiting to die. No one to talk to, nothing to see but the unchanging gray dome, gray snow, gray spaceship and a few identically gray soldiers. Nothing to hear, taste or smell but yourself.
Those of us who still had any interest in the battle were keeping watch on the bottom edge of the dome, waiting for the first Taurans to come through. So it took us a second to realize what was going on when the attack did start. It came from above, a cloud of catapulted darts swarming in through the dome some thirty meters above the ground, headed straight for the center of the hemisphere.
The shields were big enough that you could hide most of your body behind them by crouching slightly; the people who saw the darts coming could protect themselves easily. The ones who had their backs to the action, or were just asleep at the switch, had to rely on dumb luck for survival; there was no way to shout a warning, and it took only three seconds for a missile to get from the edge of the dome to its center.
We were lucky, losing only five. One of them was an archer, Shubik. I took over her bow and we waited, expecting a ground attack immediately.
It didn’t come. After a half hour, I went around the circle and explained with gestures that the first thing you were supposed to do, if anything happened, was to touch the person on your right. He’d do the same, and so on down the line.
That might have saved my life. The second dart attack, a couple of hours later, came from behind me. I felt the nudge, slapped the person on my right, turned around and saw the cloud descending. I got the shield over my head, and they hit a split second later.
I set down my bow to pluck three darts from the shield and the ground attack started.
It was a weird, impressive sight. Some three hundred of them stepped into the field simultaneously, almost shoulder-to-shoulder around the perimeter of the dome. They advanced in step, each one holding a round shield barely large enough to hide his massive chest. They were throwing darts similar to the ones we had been barraged with.
