She hobbled out to see the team meet at the perimeter for their departure. They slipped out of camp after midnight, with only the light of the gibbous Zenobian moon to guide them. (According to the books, the local moon—Vono, the Zenobians called it—was a bit smaller than old Earth’s famous Luna, but it was bright and impressive enough to these legionnaires, most of whom came from small-mooned or even moonless worlds).
Actually, the team could probably have made its move in broad daylight, since everybody in Omega Company except for Botchup and Snipe knew what was about to happen. Of course, if the major caught them and tried to make a big deal of it, they might have to break a few more regulations than they’d planned on breaking. Even the success of their decidedly non-regulation mission wouldn’t necessarily excuse the violations if the major decided to get vindictive, which struck everybody as exactly how he’d play it. Just to avoid unnecessary complications, they’d decided to go at night.
After a final check of equipment and supplies, Qual led them off into the dark. With luck, they’d reach their destination without being detected by the aliens or missed by the major. Standing there watching them fade into the darkness, Rembrandt had a twinge of regret at not being able to join them. But another twinge from her back told her in no uncertain terms that she’d made the right decision. She turned and walked slowly back to her bunk, hoping all her other decisions had been right. She’d know the answer soon enough.
Chapter Thirteen
The Zenobian desert, like those on most other planets, was a far more diverse and fertile environment than most city-dwellers would have realized. Especially to the Zenobians, who were most at home in a swamplike setting, any large dry area seemed much like any other. But as the team set out to search for the source of the alien signals quickly saw, this was no simple unbroken expanse of dry sand. There was life aplenty here, some of it very lively and very dangerous to the unwary.
Flight Leftenant Qual knew some of it; city-bred though he was, he’d seen desert wildlife both during his military training and in zoos back home. By default, he was their native guide. But even he admitted that much of it was new to him. “If you espy anything you don’t comprehend, make your path distant from it,” he said cheerfully. The others nodded soberly and did as he said.
This policy was not easy to follow since (following the practice of desert experts everywhere) they planned to travel at night when the heat was least oppressive and when they were least likely to be picked out by anyone watching. Because the indigenous animals were themselves nocturnal in their habits, chance encounters were more frequent than the legionnaires would have liked. Every now and then something close by would make an unexpected noise, and one of the off-worlders was likely to jump. Sometimes Qual told them the names of the creatures: There was a loud-voiced, squatty thing he called a grambler, a little burrowing creature called a western flurn, and a furtive thing with eyes that shone brightly in their Legion-issue night vision goggles, which Qual’s translator solemnly informed them was a spotted sloon.
Most of these were no trouble, but there was a lizardlike thing with half-inch-long teeth that could leap high off the ground to attack whatever had disturbed it. That little pest had them flinching at the least sign of motion in their pathway, with vigorous cursing in three languages and several dialects. The hopper-biter blended invisibly into the low brush. Even with the night vision goggles, it was hard to spot it in time to avoid a nasty bite. After a couple of near misses, the team took to detouring around any patch of vegetation—a tactic which, the farther they got into the desert, cost them more and more time.
Finally, confronted with a nearly unbroken patch of ankle-high brush to cross, Qual called a halt and turned to face the others in the party. “We are making too slow advancement,” he said quietly. “Here is a technique that may expedite our forward gains.” He loosened the sling on his stun ray and took the weapon in both hands.
“Oh, wow, I get it,” said Brick. “We hose the area we want to walk through, and that knocks out the varmints so we can get past. Why didn’t I think of that?”
“It is not a technique to employ constantly,” said Qual. “With many stunners firing, there is danger of hitting one’s teammates. If one is essaying a stealthy approach, it may alert the adversary if small animals in the path of approach begin to fall from their perches or drop from the air. And it is predestinated that a few of the stunned animals will be killed by falling or will be gobbled by others that recover more swiftly. And last, constant use dissipates the energy of the weapon, and it takes a certain time to recharge—a poor situation if one expects to encounter hostility.”
“Which might or might not happen to us,” said Sushi. He looked uncomfortable in his desert gear, but he’d kept up with the group fairly well. City-bred or not, he was in excellent physical condition from his hours of martial arts training.
“In that case, we need to be ready for all possibilities,” said Mahatma, smiling. “That’s what the sergeants keep telling us. It’s impossible, of course.”
“Sure, and so’s FTL. Just ask any classical physicist,” said Sushi. “Of course, you’d need time travel to go find one—they’re all dead—and that’s impossible too.”
“Impossible is not a word I have heard Captain Clown use,” said Flight Leftenant Qual. “Therefore you will not let it rule your speculations. ‘The gryff sees only gryffish things, and therefore knows not the mountain,’ or so my egg-mother always proclaimed. Of course, gryffs are very stupid.”
“What’s a gryff?” asked Double-X.
“A large, clumsy omnivore,” said Qual. “They do not inhabit the desert, so we need not worry about them.” He pointed his stun ray forward and depressed the firing button. “Come. I will clear the way for a while, and you will follow. When my weapon has used half its charge, another of you will take over.”
He stepped to the front of the group and began sweeping his ray across the path. After a moment, he moved forward, and the team fell in behind him. They had no further trouble with hopper-biters.
* * *
There was nothing Major Botchup enjoyed quite as much as springing a surprise inspection. It gave him an exhilarating sense of power to see grown men and women cringing when he came unexpectedly into sight. They’d pretend they didn’t see him, hoping he would go away. Sometimes he would just go about his business. But other times—just often enough to be unpredictable—he would pounce.
He didn’t disguise the thrill he got from their panic as they realized they had no chance to conceal the things they’d let slide. And there were always things they’d let slide, things they wanted to conceal. That provided another thrill: finding all the evidence of their slacking off and wrongdoing and rubbing their noses in it, with ample punishment for every defect he found. Stern, unrelenting discipline was the best possible way to guarantee that the troops would live in fear of him, which was the only emotion the major wanted to inspire in his troops.
So there was a feral grin on his face as he emerged from the command entrance to the MBC first thing in the morning. This early, they wouldn’t be expecting him. If he was lucky, they’d still be groggy from sleep. His eyes swung from side to side, his nose wrinkling as if he could sniff out his prey. He hadn’t made up his mind just where he would strike today, but he knew he would eventually find a target. And then his aim would be unerring, and those who had earned his righteous wrath would tremble at the memory for years to come.
There, in the shade of a tool shed across the central parade ground of the camp, he spotted a likely target. It was one of the sorry pack of aliens that had been exiled to this pariah company because they couldn’t cut the mustard in the real Legion. A Volton, reading a book. There shouldn’t be any time for reading. He could give the creature a good chewing out just on general principles.
But it wouldn’t do to charge across the parade ground directly at his victim. If the Volton had something to hide, he might slink off when he saw Botchup coming, and that would make th
e major exert himself for no purpose. Better to take a roundabout approach and lure the loafing sophont into complacency. There was a small knot of legionnaires to his left, so he chose that direction.
As Major Botchup’s eyes focused on the group he was approaching, they began to grow wider—and wider still. The group ahead of him was even worse than anything his previous experience of Omega Company had led him to expect. They were lounging idly, clearly doing nothing in particular. Worse, they were out of uniform! Instead, they wore a hodgepodge of civilian clothes, mixed with bizarre purple garments of various sorts. Most were unkempt and unshaven; in his entire career in the Space Legion, Major Botchup had never seen anything to approach it.
He swooped on the group like a tactical hoverjet discovering an unprotected ammo dump. “What the devil do you people think you’re doing?” he snapped. “This is an outrage! Where are your uniforms?”
“We done took ’em off, Major,” said one human in an accent that straddled the boundary between Standard and incomprehensible jargon. “Lieutenant Snipe’s orders.”
“What?” Botchup’s face turned the same color as the antirobot camouflage the troops were wearing. “If Snipe said any such thing, I’ll see him cashiered out of the service! Exactly when did he issue this order?”
“Well, it was just yesterday, Major,” said a young woman whose face seemed vaguely familiar. “A bunch of us asked him about which orders we had to obey, and he said—”
“Which orders to obey? Preposterous!” By now, the major had gone well past the boiling point. “A legionnaire obeys all orders, or I’ll know the reason why! Where are your sergeants?”
“I dunno, Major,” said the first legionnaire—Street, according to his name tag. “They don’t usually bother us long as we doin’ the job—”
“They’ll answer to me, then!” the major fumed. “What makes you think you can dress this way?”
The legionnaires all began talking at once. “Well, Major, Sarge said we was likely to see action against robots …”
“It was the captain told us to wear the uniforms he got us, so we figured we shouldn’t keep wearin’ ’em, ’cause he’s not the CO anymore …”
“The captain said not to worry about the robots, but we aren’t supposed to obey him …”
“I didn’t have any of my old uniforms …”
“I didn’t have anything but civvies, ’cause of when I joined up …”
“Quiet!” Major Botchup shouted. The entire group—indeed, the entire camp—fell into complete silence, broken only by the faint hum of machinery and the steady gurgling of the company water pump, not far from where they stood. The major put his hands on his hips and said in a voice that could have air-cooled the entire camp, “I don’t know what Lieutenant Snipe told you, but I’m not going to let that get in the way of proper Legion discipline. Every man jack of you is going to report yourselves to Lieutenant Snipe for conduct unbecoming a legionnaire, and then you are going to your quarters and get into proper uniform. And you are every one of you going to do extra punishment duty, and it will be damned hard duty, I promise you!”
“But Major—” came a voice from the back of the group.
“Oh, shut up!” said Major Botchup. He looked around the camp, ready to flay another victim. Much to his annoyance, the Volton he’d observed before had gone away. But he’d find somebody else. He was sure of that.
* * *
The search party had settled down after its first full night of desert travel. Soon the Zenobian sun would be rising, and when it did, they needed to be under shade. They’d set up in a pair of insulated tents on the north side of a small hill, where they’d get a bit more shade. They’d try to sleep through the daylight hours and get a fresh start when the sun had dipped low in the sky again.
Just before they’d halted, Garbo had surprised a small creature near the edge of a water hole, and she and Qual had run it down. Now she and Brick were stewing it, stretched out with Legion-ration dried vegetables, in a pot over a portable heating unit between the tents; it smelled delicious. Meanwhile, Flight Leftenant Qual, whose race preferred its food uncooked, had gone out into the desert to find a breakfast more to his liking.
In his tent, Sushi had set up his portable detector unit and strung out a few meters of antenna between the tent and a spiky plant a little distance away, trying to get a more precise fix on the signal they were homing in on.
“How much farther do we have to go, Soosh?” asked Mahatma, who was sharing the tent with Sushi and Double-X. “This desert travel is nowhere near as oppressive as Major Botchup, but it’ll never be my idea of relaxation.”
“Hard to get a precise reading,” said Sushi, fiddling with the fine tuning. “If I knew how strong the signal is at its source, I’d have a better idea. At a guess, it’s a couple more days of travel; but if the signal’s an order of magnitude stronger than I think, it could be a lot farther.”
“What do we do if it’s halfway around the planet?” said Double-X, who lay on top of his sleeping bag, propped up on one elbow to play a handheld computer game. “I ain’t walkin’ all that far, even if it does get me out from under the major’s nose for a while.”
“That’s for Qual to decide,” said Sushi. “It’s his people that are being invaded, and it’s a fairly big priority for them, so I suspect he’s not going to give up unless it’s obviously hopeless.”
“What if it ain’t obvious to him?” said Double-X. “He can live off the land, but we’re gonna run out of food sooner or later, even if we do catch one of these desert rats every now and then.”
“After seeing Garbo hunt, I would think we’d catch one more often than that,” said Mahatma. “She is very efficient once she spots a prey creature. And unless my nose is playing tricks on me, this one will make very good eating.”
“Yeah, it does smell good,” admitted Double-X. “That don’t mean I wanna eat it every night for the rest of my life—”
Sushi raised a hand to cut him off. “Hold it a moment; I’m getting something,” he said. The receiver had begun emitting a series of high-pitched squeals and beeps.
“Aww, give a guy a break, Soosh. That’s just noise,” said Double-X. “You been out in the sun too long if you expect that to make any sense.”
“Soosh can’t find out if it makes sense if you don’t let him hear it,” said Mahatma, with an expansive gesture. “Why not give him the break?”
Double-X had already opened his mouth to reply when he grasped Mahatma’s point and closed it again, nodding silently. The beeps from the receiver continued, getting louder and softer as Sushi continued to play with the fine tuning. “I’d swear there’s a repeating pattern, but I can’t quite put my finger on it,” he said. “I wish I had the captain’s Port-a-Brain.”
“I wish I had the money to buy one of those mothers and then go spend it on other stuff,” said Double-X, but he kept his voice low.
“It’s fading out,” said Sushi, leaning closer to the receiver. “I’m losing the signal, damn it! No—quiet, it’s getting stronger …” The others held their breath, but a moment later, the signal faded out entirely and was replaced by obviously random noise. Sushi pounded a fist into his thigh and said, “Well, it’s gone again. We might as well eat.”
“If these creatures are affected by the heat, they’re probably getting ready to go to sleep, just as we are,” Mahatma pointed out. “That could explain the signal fading in daytime.”
“It doesn’t fade every day,” grumbled Sushi. “There must be some other explanation.”
“And perhaps we will learn it,” said Mahatma, getting to his feet. “But for now, I am interested mostly in learning how this stew will taste. Gambolt cookery will be a new experience.”
“Hey, I helped cook it too,” said Brick with mock indignation.
“Then we will blame you equally with Garbo if it is inedible,” said Mahatma, deadpan. Before Brick could react, he added, “It does not smell inedible, though. I don’t think
there will be any blame to apportion.”
“Continue in that vein, and we will forget to include you when we apportion the stew,” said Garbo. While translators were not at all reliable on the subtler nuances of alien speech, the statement was accompanied by a very good simulation of laughter. Grinning, the legionnaires filled their mess kits with the stew and were soon enjoying a meal that even Escrima might have taken some pride in serving them.
* * *
Mess Sergeant Escrima lifted the lid of the soup pot and took a deep sniff. He wrinkled his nose, trying to decide how it was coming along. Captain Jester had found him a source for several herbs and spices he’d been running short of. The shipment had come in just before they’d departed Landoor, and he’d left them unopened until their arrival at the new base. Now he was beginning to work them into his recipes. So far, everything had been good quality, but Escrima wasn’t a man to jump to conclusions—at least, not when it came to cookery.
This was the first time he’d used the bay leaves, touted as being from the same grower who supplied the Alliance Senate dining hall. Escrima had heard that kind of puffery before and knew better than to put much weight on it. The aroma coming from the pot wasn’t bad, he had to admit … but how was it going to taste? There was only one way to find out.
He’d been scowling at the slowly simmering liquid, trying to decide whether it was time yet to dip in a spoon and taste it, when he became aware of someone entering his kitchen. He turned and glared. Whoever it was might have legitimate business here, but he didn’t want them to start thinking it was a place just anyone could walk into whenever they felt like it. He had a reputation to maintain.
It was the new CO, Major Ketchup, or something like that. He waved a sheaf of printouts and growled, “Sergeant, I see from these purchase orders that you’ve been going outside the Legion commissary network for supplies. That’s a violation of policy, and an unnecessary expense to boot. What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
The Complete Phule’s Company Boxed Set Page 102
