by David Drake
“Something's wrong with the ship!” cried Rackrill. “It's heavy and dead!”
“We're drawing most of the broadcast power this side of Mars,” I said. “In a minute you'll be glad we have that protection!”
Transstar came then. The fast patrols whisked out of black space and leaped into our atmosphere like gleaming fish, fired a rocking blast of weaponry, and were gone to rendezvous, reform, and pass again. They were like nothing the eaber had ever seen. They were made for a star-go like this, a burst of light, a dazzle, and a thunder that came and came and came. Behind them came the light patrols and then the medium patrols and then the heavy patrols and then the fast light shock ships and then the medium shock ships and then the heavy shocks, wave upon wave upon wave.
Even wrapped in our thick blanket of power we were stunned.
The planet came alight like a pearl below us. The air was jammed with sound shocks, the dazzle was like a spreading, thickening bomb of light that transfixed the eyeballs even through the dark screens I had set up.
“This is early stuff,” I told Euben conversationally. “They just do a little holding till the important ships arrive. Patrols and first shocks—the usual things, you know.”
Euben's mouth was open. He took time to swallow before he screamed orders to his ships below.
The patrols and shocks were suddenly past firing range. For a moment you could see the planet through the haze. Its shore lines and rivers had sickened and wavered. The eaber ships, which had been a blanket, were a tattered rag.
Hennessy, the headquarters jokester, couldn't resist a comment that probably earned him a fine. “Here comes the cavalry,” he said over the TV.
And they came.
It was good professional stuff, geared to star action. Now we had the regulars. They came in waves of ten thousand, which was a wee bit impressive, I thought. There were the ground regulars, the medium regulars, and the high regulars, each division with thirty categories, each category with its subdivisions of missiles, rockets, and drones. The atmosphere screamed at us. The density of the light assumed sun proportions, and our poor little ship was like a chip on an angry ocean. Rackrill had his mouth wide open. He was yelling to relieve his tension at the awesome sight; the others were lost in the overwhelming cataclysm of it. I had seen it in movies.
I poured myself a cup of tea.
“These are just the on-call regulars,” I told Euben. “Of course, you realize that in a Prime Red we're getting total mobilization. We'll get slightly less than a million ships in the first hour. The rest will come later.”
Euben had stopped shouting orders. He stared at me. He said something that I couldn't hear. The pounding went on for fifteen minutes; then the planet cleared. There weren't any shore lines or rivers any more. There weren't very many eaber ships.
“Stop it,” he said.
I shook my head. “Sorry. A Prime Red can't be stopped easily. Once the momentum starts it has to run its course. Get set now. Here come your specials.”
As the specials started to arrive, I taunted the division commanders. “Transstar is getting rusty. You've hardly nicked the planet. Can't your boys shoot properly any more?”
They came in fat and sleek. Far off they waddled and wallowed, like a bunch of old ladies hitting a bargain counter. But suddenly they were serious, close up, and I had to close the portholes against the awesome roar and light of their work. You name the ray, bullet, bomb, gas—it was there.
A half hour later the din eased off and we looked. A large fragment of seared rock floated in space. The entire eaber fleet had long ago disappeared. So had everything else except that radioactive rock.
The last wave was the massive attack unit, very slow and lumbering compared to the others, but packed with power. The first five thousand took eager bites of the rock — and there was nothing left for the other twenty-five thousand. There was nothing left at all of Point Everready except some haze hanging below us in space. But it was too late to stop the attack.
To one side of us the returning waves began to streak by—the patrols, fast, light, medium, and heavy, the shocks, first, second, and third, the regulars in their streaming divisions and then the specials. Meanwhile, closer by, the second wave was coming in, first patrols and first shocks, darting a few shots to keep their hand in, at the floating dust patches.
Euben looked out and saw ships to his left and to his right and behind him and below him and above him and in all positions in between. It was such a heavy concentration that the stars were blocked out and, though no atmosphere existed for a nonexistent planet, we were a planet of moving ships, ourselves creating a gravity and a stinking jet-flame atmosphere. It was a moving dream of hell, enough to make your mind crack open with the motion of it. It was the phantom action of a near-million starships—and another million on the way.
This was the total war capacity delivered to order.
What it cost in disruption and money and waste was incredible to contemplate. But that was Prime Total Red — everything we had. And it wasn't at all pointless.
“The eaber surrender,” said Euben.
He stood respectfully now, his commander behind him. I guess he was thinking of the remaining eaber colonies on other planets, as there was nothing left to surrender here.
I handed him a rag. “You may now wipe the spit off my TV plate receiver,” I said. He did it with alacrity.
“We will go elsewhere,” said Euben's companion. “After all, space is big. There is plenty of room for two great races.”
“One great race,” I said.
“Of course,” he said affably. “May we have our lives spared?”
“We want you to have them—so you can take the word home.”
The action outside had stilled. I opened the ports and began to move slowly toward another planet where the eaber had dwellings, as requested by the shaken Euben. Rackrill patted my shoulder. “Boy, that Transstar!” he exulted.
“It's quite a lot,” I admitted. I painfully inched over to the stricken Martha and squeezed her hand. I thought she squeezed back. I thought I saw a flicker of joy at our success—but there was so much eaber and so much death in her eyes it was hard to know. I had to leave her then, for the medics came aboard for her.
I began to glide down on the new planet to discharge Euben and the other eaber. “Look,” I said gesturing over my shoulder. Behind us the Transstar fleet followed docilely, the mass and weight of them, guns racked and quiet, the great beast behind my tiny patrol dot.
“We'll stay around a few days in case you want to argue some more,” I told Euben.
He shook his head. “That will not be necessary, my good friend. We are not stupid. In the future you'll see very little of the eaber.”
The ship settled. I opened the door and put down the ladder and Euben's companion descended, men Euben. “I am sorry—” he began.
But I thought of Martha and the dead boy who had died on Everready and the pet human and the drone eaber and the others who had suffered and died to make this creature sorry. So I planted my good foot on his rear. He crashed into his master and they both fell in the mud at the bottom of the ladder. They got up, mud-splattered, and ran like the wind toward eaberdom, capes flying out behind them.
Rackrill laughed. It was the first relaxed laugh I'd heard in all that assignment. It pulled things back to normal.
I turned back to my blazing board and bit a button. “Condition White,” I said, “and don't kid me that you got up all these starships on seventy-five seconds’ notice. They left Earth-alpha weeks ago. You knew from the first we were in for a Condition Prime Total Red with the eaber.”
The old man grinned. “It's the agents who louse us up. We were afraid you'd observe so long that you'd start the action on an orange and build a whole new tradition—Ten.”
Ten! I remembered then that anybody who ordered a CPTR was automatically up for Ten rank and sent to a nice, soft job at Prime.
“Save me a wide, plump chair
at the TV console at Prime,” I said. “Get me a desk-sized teapot, and a soft cushion for a bum leg.”
I turned the ship around and started to lead the massive fleet home.
I stared at the far-flung stars of space as I drank my tea, eyes blurred a little with tears. I was an organization man. The organization was all I had, or would ever have. It didn't seem enough. Even the playing of the Transstar victory song left me depressed.
Then suddenly the light broke.
A Transstar agent is both the most and the least important of men. He is a fireman who puts out fires—a hero, but a shadow. A master sometimes, but mostly a servant. I winked at Mayberry on the screen. They saw I knew and winked back. They had finally lost a pompous, Transstar-impressed agent and gained a useful career man.
They were satisfied.
So was I.
A war is expensive: it absorbs a great deal of a society's available resources. Though governments usually phrase the decision for war in terms of right and wrong, the real equation boils down to a question of whether the society (or at least the decisionmaker) will be better off as a result of war than as a result of peace on the available terms. This is obvious to anyone who knows history, but it's such a hard truth that Transstar is one of very few stories to address situation.
If I had written Transstar, the conclusion would have been different. I wanted to ask Ray Banks whether the tone was his or a change by H.L. Gold, an editor famous for rewriting stories … but Banks died two years before I located him. I don't regret not knowing the answer to that question nearly as much as I regret not having been able to tell Banks how much his story moved me, when I first read it as a teenager and every time I've reread it since.
—DAD
Time Piece
Joe Haldeman
They say you've got a fifty-fifty chance every time you go out. That makes it one chance in eight that you'll live to see your third furlough; the one I'm on now.
Somehow the odds don't keep people from trying to join. Even though not one in a thousand gets through the years of training and examination, there's no shortage of cannon fodder. And that's what we are. The most expensive, best trained cannon fodder in the history of warfare. Human history, anyhow; who can speak for the enemy?
I don't even call them snails anymore. And the thought of them doesn't trigger that instant flash of revulsion, hate, kill-fever—the psyconditioning wore off years ago, and they didn't renew it. They've stopped doing it to new recruits; no percentage in berserkers. I was a wild one the first couple of trips, though.
Strange world I've come back to. Gets strangers every time, of course. Even sitting here in a bogus twenty-first century bar, where everyone speaks Basic and there's real wood on the walls and peaceful holograms instead of plugins and music made by men …
But it leaks through. I don't pay by card, let alone by coin. The credit register monitors my alpha waves and communicates with the bank every time I order a drink. And, in case I've become addicted to more modern vices, there's a feelie matrix (modified to look like an old-fashioned visi-phone booth) where I can have my brain stimulated directly. Thanks but no, thanks—always get this picture of dirty hands inside my skull, kneading, rubbing. Like when you get too close to the enemy and they open a hole in your mind and you go spinning down and down and never reach the bottom till you die. I almost got too close last time.
We were on a three-man reconnaissance patrol, bound for a hellish little planet circling the red giant Antares. Now red giant stars don't form planets in the natural course of things, so we had ignored Antares; we control most of the space around it, so why waste time in idle exploration? But the enemy had detected this little planet—God knows how— and about ten years after they landed there, we monitored their presence (gravity waves from the ships’ braking) and my team was assigned the reconnaissance. Three men against many, many of the enemy—but we weren't supposed to fight if we could help it; just take a look around, record what we saw, and leave a message beacon on our way back, about a light-year out from Antares. Theoretically, the troopship following us by a month will pick up the information and use it to put together a battle plan. Actually, three more recon patrols precede the troop ship at one-week intervals; insurance against the high probability that any one patrol will be caught and destroyed. As the first team in, we have a pretty good chance of success, but the ones to follow would be in trouble if we didn't get back out. We'd be past caring, of course: the enemy doesn't take prisoners.
We came out of lightspeed close to Antares, so the bulk of the star would mask our braking disturbance, and inserted the ship in a hyperbolic orbit that would get us to the planet—Anomaly, we were calling it—in about twenty hours.
“Anomaly must be tropical over most of its surface,” Fred Sykes, nominally the navigator, was talking to himself and at the two of us while he analyzed the observational data rolling out of the ship's computer. “No axial tilt to speak of. Looks like they've got a big outpost near the equator, lots of electromagnetic noise there. Figures … the goddamn snails like it hot. We requisitioned hot-weather gear, didn't we, Pancho?”
Pancho, that's me. “No, Fred, all we got's parkas and snowshoes.” My full name is Francisco Jesus Mario Juan-José Hugo de Naranja, and I outrank Fred, so he should at least call me Francisco. But I've never pressed the point. Pancho it is. Fred looked up from his figure and the rookie, Paul Spiegel, almost dropped the pistol he was cleaning.
“But why …” Paul was staring. “We knew the planet was probably Earthlike if the enemy wanted it. Are we gonna have to go tromping around in spacesuits?”
“No, Paul, our esteemed leader and supply clerk is being sarcastic again.” He turned back to his computer. “Explain, Pancho.”
“No, that's all right,” Paul reddened a bit and also went back to his job. “I remember you complaining about having to take the standard survival issue.”
“Well, I was right then and I'm doubly right now. We've got parkas back there, and snowshoes, and a complete terranorm environment recirculator, and everything else we could possibly need to walk around in comfort on every planet known to man—Dios! That issue masses over a metric ton, more than a giga-watt laser. A laser we could use, but crampons and pith helmets and elephant guns …”
Paul looked up again. “Elephant guns?” He was kind of a freak about weapons.
“Yeah.”
“That's a gun that shoots elephants?”
“Right. An elephant gun shoots elephants.”
“Is that some new kind of ammunition?”
I sighed, I really sighed. You'd think I'd get used to this after twelve years—or four hundred—in the service. “No, kid, elephants were animals, big gray wrinkled animals with horns. You used an elephant gun to shoot at them.
“When I was a kid in Rioplex, back in the twenty-first, we had an elephant in the zoo; used to go down in the summer and feed him synthos through the bars. He had a long nose like a fat tail, he ate with that.”
“What planet were they from?”
It went on like that for a while. It was Paul's first trip out, and he hadn't yet gotten used to the idea that most of his compatriots were genuine antiques, preserved by the natural process of relativity. At lightspeed you age imperceptibly, while the universe's calendar adds a year for every light-year you travel. Seems like cheating. But it catches up with you eventually.
We hit the atmosphere of Anomaly at an oblique angle and came in passive, like a natural meteor, until we got to a position where we were reasonably safe from detection (just above the south polar sea), then blasted briefly to slow down and splash. Then we spent a few hours in slow flight at sea level, sneaking up on their settlement.
It appeared to be the only enemy camp on the whole planet, which was typical. Strange for a spacefaring, aggressive race to be so incurious about planetary environments, but they always seemed to settle in one place and simply expand radially. And they do expand; their reproduction rate makes rabbits
look sick. Starting from one colony, they can fill a world in two hundred years. After that, they control their population by infantiphage and stellar migration.
We landed about a hundred kilometers from the edge of their colony, around local midnight. While we were outside setting up the espionage monitors, the ship camouflaged itself to match the surrounding jungle optically, thermally, magnetically, etc.—We were careful not to get too far from the ship; it can be a bit hard to find even when you know where to look.
The monitors were to be fed information from fleasized flying robots, each with a special purpose, and it would take several hours for them to wing into the city. We posted a one-man guard, one-hour shifts; the other two inside the ship until the monitors started clicking. But they never started.
Being senior, I took the first watch. A spooky hour, the jungle making dark little noises all around, but nothing happened. Then Fred stood the next hour, while I put on the deepsleep helmet. Figured I'd need the sleep—once data started coming in, I'd have to be alert for about forty hours. We could all sleep for a week once we got off Anomaly and hit lightspeed.
Getting yanked out of deepsleep is like an ice-water douche to the brain. The black nothing dissolved and there was Fred a foot away from my face, yelling my name over and over. As soon as he saw my eyes open, he ran for the open lock, priming his laser on the way (definitely against regulations, could hole the hull that way; I started to say something but couldn't form the words). Anyhow, what were we doing in free fall? And how could Fred run across the deck like that while we were in free fall?
Then my mind started coming back into focus and I could analyze the sinking, spinning sensation—not free-fall vertigo at all, but what we used to call snail-fever. The enemy was very near. Crackling combat sounds drifted in from outdoors.
I sat up on the cot and tried to sort everything out and get going. After long seconds my arms and legs got the idea, I struggled up and staggered to the weapons cabinet. Both the lasers were gone, and the only heavy weapon left was a grenade launcher. I lifted it from the rack and made my way to the lock.
