by David Drake
Inside, the buzzing talk of seven pretty little girls.
“So I says to him— ‘Don't give me that, Mr. High and Mighty.’ So he says, ‘Oh yeah?’ And I says, ‘Yeah!’”
“Honest, will I ever be glad when this thing's over. I saw the cutest hat on my last furlough. Oh, what I wouldn't give to wear it!”
“You too? Don't I know it! You just can't get your hair right. Not in this weather. Why don't they let us get rid of it?”
“Men! They make me sick.”
Seven gestures, seven postures, seven laughters ringing thin beneath thunder. Teeth showing in girl giggles. Hands tireless, painting pictures in the air.
P.G. Center. Girls. Seven of them. Pretty. Not one over sixteen. Curls. Pigtails. Bangs. Pouting little lips—smiling, frowning, shaping emotion on emotion. Sparkling young eyes—glittering, twinkling, narrowing, cold or warm.
Seven healthy young bodies restive on wooden chairs. Smooth adolescent limbs. Girls—pretty girls—seven of them.
An Army of ugly shapeless men, stumbling in mud, struggling along pitch-black muddy road.
Rain a torrent. Buckets of it thrown on each exhausted man. Sucking sound of great boots sinking into oozy yellow-brown mud, pulling loose. Mud dripping from heels and soles.
Plodding men—hundreds of them—soaked, miserable, depleted. Young men bent over like old men. Jaws hanging loosely, mouths gasping at black wet air, tongues lolling, sunken eyes looking at nothing, betraying nothing.
Rest.
Men sink down in the mud, fall on their packs. Heads thrown back, mouths open, rain splashing on yellow teeth. Hands immobile—scrawny heaps of flesh and bone. Legs without motion—khaki lengths of worm-eaten wood. Hundreds of useless limbs fixed to hundreds of useless trunks.
In back, ahead, beside rumble trucks and tanks and tiny cars. Thick tires splattering mud. Fat treads sinking, tearing at mucky slime. Rain drumming wet fingers on metal and canvas.
Lightning flashbulbs without pictures. Momentary burst of light. The face of war seen for a second—made of rusty guns and turning wheels and faces staring.
Blackness. A night hand blotting out the brief storm glow. Windblown rain flitting over fields and roads, drenching trees and trucks. Rivulets of bubbly rain tearing scars from the earth. Thunder, lightning.
A whistle. Dead men resurrected. Boots in sucking mud again—deeper, closer, nearer. Approach to a city that bars the way to a city that bars the way to a …
An officer sat in the communication room of the P.G. Center. He peered at the operator, who sat hunched over the control board, phones over his ears, writing down a message.
The officer watched the operator. They are coming, he thought. Cold, wet, and afraid they are marching at us. He shivered and shut his eyes.
He opened them quickly. Visions fill his darkened pupils—of curling smoke, flaming men, unimaginable horrors that shape themselves without word or pictures.
“Sir,” said the operator, “from advance observation post. Enemy forces sighted.”
The officer got up, walked over to the operator and took the message. He read it, face blank, mouth parenthesized. “Yes,” he said.
He turned on his heel and went to the door. He opened it and went into the next room. The seven girls stopped talking. Silence breathed on the walls.
The officer stood with his back to the plastic window. “Enemies,” he said. “Two miles away. Right in front of you.”
He turned and pointed out the window. “Right out there. Two miles away. Any questions?”
A girl giggled.
“Any vehicles?” another asked.
“Yes. Five trucks, five small command cars, two tanks.”
“That's too easy,” laughed the girl, slender fingers fussing with her hair.
“That's all,” said the officer. He started from the room. “Go to it,” he added and, under his breath. “Monsters!”
He left.
“Oh, me,” sighed one of the girls, “Here we go again.”
“What a bore,” said another. She opened her delicate mouth and plucked out chewing gum. She put it under her chair seat.
“At least it stopped raining,” said a redhead, tying her shoelaces.
The seven girls looked around at each other. Are you ready? said their eyes. I'm ready, I suppose. They adjusted themselves on the chairs with girlish grunts and sighs. They hooked their feet around the legs of their chairs. All gum was placed in storage. Mouths were tightened into prudish fixity. The pretty little girls made ready for the game.
Finally they were silent on their chairs. One of them took a deep breath. So did another. They all tensed their milky flesh and clasped fragile fingers together. One quickly scratched her head to get it over with. Another sneezed prettily.
“Now,” said a girl on the right end of the row.
Seven pairs of beady eyes shut. Seven innocent little minds began to picture, to visualize, to transport.
Lips rolled into thin gashes, faces drained of color, bodies shivered passionately. Their fingers twitching with concentration, seven pretty little girls fought a war.
The men were coming over the rise of a hill when the attack came. The leading men, feet poised for the next step, burst into flame.
There was no time to scream. Their rifles slapped down into the muck, their eyes were lost in fire. They stumbled a few steps and fell, hissing and charred, into the soft mud.
Men yelled. The ranks broke. They began to throw up their weapons and fire at the night. More troops puffed incandescently, flared up, were dead.
“Spread out!” screamed an officer as his gesturing fingers sprouted flame and his face went up in licking yellow heat.
The men looked everywhere. Their dumb terrified eyes searched for an enemy. They fired into the fields and woods. They shot each other. They broke into flopping runs over the mud.
A truck was enveloped in fire. Its driver leaped out, a two-legged torch. The truck went bumping over the road, turned, wove crazily over the field, crashed into a tree, exploded and was eaten up in blazing light. Black shadows flitted in and out of the aura of light around the flames. Screams rent the night.
Man after man burst into flame, fell crashing on his face in the mud. Spots of searing light lashed the wet darkness—screams—running coals, spluttering, glowing, dying—incendiary ranks—trucks cremated—tanks blowing up.
A little blonde, her body tense with repressed excitement. Her lips twitch, a giggle hovers in her throat. Her nostrils dilate. She shudders in giddy fright. She imagines, imagines …
A soldier runs headlong across a field, screaming, his eye insane with horror. A gigantic boulder rushes at him from the black sky.
His body is driven into the earth, mangled. From the rock edge, fingertips protrude.
The boulder lifts from the ground, crashes down again, a shapeless trip hammer. A flaming truck is flattened. The boulder flies again to the black sky.
A pretty brunette, her face a feverish mask. Wild thoughts tumble through her virginal brain. Her scalp grows taut with ecstatic fear. Her lips draw back from clenching teeth. A gasp of terror hisses from her lips. She imagines, imagines …
A soldier falls to his knees. His head jerks back. In the light of burning comrades, he stares dumbly at the white-foamed wave that towers over him.
It crashes down, sweeps his body over the muddy earth, fills his lungs with salt water. The tidal wave roars over the field, drowns a hundred flaming men, tosses their corpses in the air with thundering whitecaps.
Suddenly the water stops, flies into a million pieces, and disintegrates.
A lovely little redhead, hands drawn under her chin in tight bloodless fists. Her lips tremble, a throb of delight expands her chest. Her white throat contracts, she gulps in a breath of air. Her nose wrinkles with dreadful joy. She imagines, imagines …
A running soldier collides with a lion. He cannot see in the darkness. His hands strike wildly at the shaggy mane. He clubs with his r
ifle butt.
A scream. His face is torn off with one blow of thick claws. A jungle roar billows in the night.
A red-eyed elephant tramples wildly through the mud, picking up men in its duck trunk, hurling them through the air, mashing them under driving black columns.
Wolves bound from the darkness, spring, tear at throats. Gorillas scream and bounce in the mud, leap at falling soldiers.
A rhinoceros, leather skin glowing in the light of living torches, crashes into a burning tank, wheels, thunders into blackness, is gone.
Fangs—claws—ripping teeth—shrieks—trumpeting—roars. The sky rains snakes.
Silence. Vast brooding silence. Not a breeze, not a drip of rain, not a grumble of distant thunder. The battle is ended.
Grey morning mist rolls over the burned, the torn, the drowned, the crushed, the poisoned, the sprawling dead.
Motionless trucks—silent tanks, wisps of oily smoke still rising from their shattered hulks. Great death covering the field. Another battle in another war.
Victory—everyone is dead.
The girls stretched languidly. They extended their arms and rotated their round shoulders. Pink lips grew wide in pretty little yawns. They looked at each other and tittered in embarrassment. Some of them blushed. A few looked guilty.
Then they all laughed out loud. They opened more gum-packs, drew compacts from pockets, spoke intimately with schoolgirl whispers, with late-night dormitory whispers.
Muted giggles rose up flutteringly in the warm room.
“Aren't we awful?” one of them said, powdering her pert nose.
Later they all went downstairs and had breakfast.
The first time I watched the autopsy of a murder victim, I was struck by the fact that while the staff removed the brain, they were discussing Carolina's chances in the forthcoming basketball season; and then I thought about Witch War. This too is a part of the truth about war.
—DAD
Transstar
Raymond E. Banks
The small group of Earth colonists stood on a hill, tense and expectant, as their leader advanced. He walked slowly away from the huddled mob, holding up his gun. You could hear the mother weep.
I stood at ease to one side, as was proper. I knew what would happen, because I was from Transstar. We have been taught to understand the inevitable.
The child came running out of the woods. I noted that they were not the woods of Earth, though they were brown. Nor was the grass the grass of Earth, though it was green.
The child cried, “Mother!” The leader raised his gun and shot it.
Even though I understood that the child was no longer a “him” and had become an “it” since falling into the hands of the aliens, I felt a tremor underneath my conditioning. In Transstar you are taught that the conditioning is a sheath, pliable but breakable; you do not put all faith in it.
Now the important thing was the reaction of the small group of Earth colonists.
They had seen the heartbreaking inevitable. They knew with the logic of their minds that the boy had to die. On this planet there were two races, two kinds of life: the eaber and the Earthmen. The eaber would lure a child away if they could and see to its infection, returning it to the Earth colony.
It was a good trick the first time or two, and for the love of their children three thousand lives had been lost, two starting colonies wiped out. This third colony had to succeed. I suspected that was why Transstar sent me here.
The leader turned sadly towards his colonists. A man advanced: “A burial! It is safe to bury!”
“It is not safe to bury,” said the leader.
The man raised his arm. The leader hesitated and lost both his leadership and his life, because the half-maddened parent shot him in the chest …
Rackrill came to my Transstar ship. “You stood there,” he said, eyes accusing. “You sit here now. You let the eaber do these things to us—yet you're from Transstar, representing the incredible power of the Sol system. Why?”
“Transstar was formed to handle star-sized situations,” I replied. “So far this colony is meeting only the problems of a local situation.”
“Local situation!” He laughed bitterly. “I'm the third mayor in three weeks.”
“There'll be no more children lost to the eaber,” I said.
“That's for certain sure,” he said, “but Transstar might lose one of its representatives if it doesn't help us in our fight against the eaber. Our colony is sickened to watch you with your magnificent starship and your empire of power, standing by while we suffer.”
“I am sorry.”
He raised his hands and stepped toward me, but an orange light hummed from the walls. He looked surprised. He dropped his hands.
“Now that you've properly cursed me, tell me the real reason for your visit, Mr. Mayor,” I said, flicking the protective button off.
He eased into his chair wearily. It was a great planet to take the starch out of the leaders.
“We had a visit from the eaber.” He went on talking eagerly. The eaber had picked this planet, Point Everready, as an advance planet-city for their own culture. They would kill the Earth colony if it didn't leave. Rackrill had told them about Transstar, about me. That I represented the total war capacity of the solar system. That I was in instantaneous touch with Transstar Prime, near Mars, and that behind me stood a million space ships and countless prime fighting men with weapons of power and vigor that could pulverize the eaber to dust. That I was there to see that the Earth colony survived.
“This is only partly true,” I said. “I am here to see whether an Earth colony can survive.”
Anyway, Rackrill had gotten the eaber stirred up. They were coming to see me. Okay?
“I am Transstar,” I said. “I can only observe, not interfere.”
He got mad again, but there was really no more to say. He left, going from the marvelous machinery of my ship back to the crudeness of the village. I felt sorry for him and his people and wished I could reassure him.
I could not.
Yet somewhere back at Transstar Prime there was more than ordinary interest in Point Everready. I wondered, as every Transstar agent must, how far Transstar would go on this project. Few Transstar men have ordered Condition Prime Total Red. Condition Prime Total Red is the complete amassing and release of our total war-making capacity directed at one enemy in one place at one time. You don't get a CPTR more than once in decades; men in Transstar have served a lifetime and never directed one.
This is good, because CPTR is devastating in cost, machines, and men. It is the most jealously guarded prerogative of the Transstar system, which is in itself merely a check-and-report to keep track of all Earth colonies spread out among the stars.
I looked at my condition panel. It glowed an off-white on the neat starship wall. Condition white, nothing unusual; the same color I had stared at for five years as a full agent and fifteen years before that as both associate and assistant, learning the Transstar operation.
I thought about the dead boy, sleeping now on the grasses of Everready, as I made my daily report, pricking a card with three simple marks, feeding it to the transmitter which reported back to Prime. It seemed unfair, even with all my years of Transstar conditioning, that a boy would only deserve three pinpricks in a daily report. The human race had not been standing behind him.
It probably would not stand behind this colony.
For that matter, though I had the safety of this rather expensive starship, the human race would probably not stand behind me, if the eaber turned out to be tough aliens. Many an agent has died in local or regional situations.
I drank a cup of tea, but the warm drink didn't help. Somehow these last years I had become more emotional. It was hard to be a Transstar agent—for, by the time you learned how, you were too knowing in the ways of space to keep that prep school enthusiasm. I remembered the men who had lived and the men who had died as I drank my tea and felt sad.
Toward mi
dnight the colonists sent scout ships up, as ordered by Rackrill. They were met by an equal number of eaber scout ships.
The patrol fight was dull, with drones being chopped off by both sides. Nothing decisive. The eaber were good. I wondered if they also had a Transstar somewhere back at their home planet, a totality of force that might match Condition Prime Total Red, and result in a stand-off fight. This had never happened in history. Someday we might even find somebody better than CPTR.
At that instant expansion to the stars would stop, I knew.
Whatever I thought about the eaber at long distance, I'd have a chance to learn more. A couple of them were now approaching my ship.
They were sentient life. They were neither monsters nor particularly Earthlike. It was this balance of like-unlike that gave me the beginnings of a shudder under my conditioning.
The reddish one advanced into my cabin. “Euben,” he said. He made a motion of turning with his hands, tapered fingers spread. A surge of sickness tickled in me, rushed up to a nerve agony. I just had time to relax and let the raping power of his ray, or whatever it was, knock me out into a welcome darkness. A nonconditioned man would have screamed and writhed on the floor, fighting the overpowering darkness. I rushed with it, gave in to it.
Presently there was a gentle bird-twitter. I sat up; Euben's power turned off. He laughed down at me.
“Some Earth-power, some potency,” he said, gesturing at my control panel. I had, indeed, pushed my orange safety button, which should have frozen him immobile as it had Rackrill. It had no effect on him or his friend.
I tried to get up but was as weak and shaking as an old man. So I sat there.
“You are the protector to the Earthians,” he said.
“No, Euben. I am merely here to observe.”
“You'll observe them made extinct, Watcher,” he said. “This is the perimeter of eaber. We want this planet ourselves.”
“That remains to be seen,” I said, finally rising stiffly and plopping into my chair. I turned off the useless orange button.
Euben roamed his eyes around the ship. “Better than your colony has. You are special.”
“I am special,” I said.
