“Cortez, I think it’s obvious,” Doc Wilson said, “that we should give these…monsters wide berth, especially shouldn’t harm any more of them. Not with five people susceptible to whatever apparently killed Ho.”
“Of course, damn it, I don’t need anybody to tell me that. We’d better get moving. I just filled the captain in on what happened; he agrees that we’d better get as far away from here as we can, before we stop for the night.
“Let’s get back in formation and continue on the same bearing. Fifth Platoon, take over point; Second, come back to the rear. Everybody else, same as before.”
“What about Ho?” Lucky asked.
“She’ll be taken care of. From the ship.”
After we’d gone half a click, there was a flash and rolling thunder. Where Ho had been, came a wispy luminous mushroom cloud boiling up to disappear against the gray sky.
13
We stopped for the “night”—actually, the sun wouldn’t set for another seventy hours—atop a slight rise some ten clicks from where we had killed the aliens. But they weren’t aliens, I had to remind myself—we were.
Two platoons deployed in a ring around the rest of us, and we flopped down exhausted. Everybody was allowed four hours’ sleep and had two hours’ guard duty.
Potter came over and sat next to me. I chinned her frequency.
“Hi, Marygay.”
“Oh, William,” her voice over the radio was hoarse and cracking. “God, it’s so horrible.”
“It’s over now….”
“I killed one of them, the first instant, I shot it right in the, in the…”
I put my hand on her knee. The contact made a plastic click and I jerked it back, visions of machines embracing, copulating. “Don’t feel singled out, Marygay, whatever guilt there is belongs evenly to all of us…but a triple portion for Cor….”
“You privates quit jawin’ and get some sleep. You both pull guard in two hours.”
“O.K., Sarge.” Her voice was so sad and tired I couldn’t bear it. I felt if I could only touch her I could drain off the sadness like a ground wire draining current but we were each trapped in our own plastic world.
“G’night, William.”
“Night.” It’s almost impossible to get sexually excited inside a suit, with the relief tube and all the silver chloride sensors poking you, but somehow this was my body’s response to the emotional impotence, maybe remembering more pleasant sleeps with Marygay, maybe feeling that in the midst of all this death, personal death could be soon, cranking up the pro-creative derrick for one last try…lovely thoughts like this, and I fell asleep and dreamed that I was a machine, mimicking the functions of life, creaking and clanking my clumsy way through the world, people too polite to say anything but giggling behind my back, and the little man who sat inside my head pulling the levers and clutches and watching the dials, he was hopelessly mad and was storing up hurts for the day….
“Mandella—wake up, damn it, your shift!”
I shuffled over to my place on the perimeter to watch for God knows what…but I was so weary I couldn’t keep my eyes open. Finally I tongued a stimtab, knowing I’d pay for it later.
For over an hour I sat there, scanning my sector left, right, near, far; the scene never changing, not even a breath of wind to stir the grass.
Then suddenly the grass parted and one of the three-legged creatures was right in front of me. I raised my finger but didn’t squeeze.
“Movement!”
“Movement!”
“HOLD YOUR FIRE. Don’t shoot!”
“Movement.”
“Movement.” I looked left and right and as far as I could see, every perimeter guard had one of the blind dumb creatures standing right in front of him.
Maybe the drug I’d taken to stay awake made me more sensitive to whatever they did. My scalp crawled and I felt a formless thing in my mind, the feeling you get when somebody has said something and you didn’t quite hear it, want to respond but the opportunity to ask him to repeat it is gone.
The creature sat back on its haunches, leaning forward on the one front leg. Big green bear with a withered arm. Its power threaded through my mind, spiderwebs, echo of night terrors, trying to communicate, trying to destroy me, I couldn’t know.
“ALL RIGHT, EVERYBODY on the perimeter, fall back, slow. Don’t make any quick gestures…anybody got a headache or anything?”
“Sergeant, this is Hollister.” Lucky.
“They’re trying to say something…I can almost…no, just….”
“Well?”
“All I can get is that they think we’re…think we’re…well, funny. They aren’t afraid.”
“You mean the one in front of you isn’t….”
“No, the feeling comes from all of them, they’re all thinking the same thing. Don’t ask me how I know, I just do.”
“Maybe they thought it was funny, what they did to Ho.”
“Maybe. I don’t feel like they’re dangerous. Just curious about us.”
“Sergeant, this is Bohrs.”
“Yeah.”
“The Taurans have been here at least a year—maybe they’ve learned how to communicate with these…overgrown teddy-bears. They might be spying on us, might be sending back….”
“I don’t think they’d show themselves, if that were the case,” Lucky said. “They can obviously hide from us pretty well when they want to.”
“Anyhow,” Cortez said, “if they’re spies, the damage has been done. Don’t think it’d be smart to take any action against them. I know you’d all like to see ’em dead for what they did to Ho, so would I, but we’d better be careful.”
I didn’t want to see them dead, but I’d just as soon not see them in any condition. I was walking backwards slowly, toward the middle of camp. The creature didn’t seem disposed to follow. Maybe he just knew we were surrounded. He was pulling up grass with his arm and munching.
“O.K., all of you platoon leaders, wake everybody up, get a roll count. Let me know if anybody’s been hurt. Tell your people we’re moving out in one minute.”
I don’t know what Cortez expected, but of course the creatures just followed right along. They didn’t keep us surrounded; just had twenty or thirty following us all the time. Not the same ones, either. Individuals would saunter away, new ones would join the parade. It was pretty obvious that they weren’t going to tire out.
We were each allowed one stimtab. Without it, no one could have marched an hour. A second pill would have been welcome after the edge started to wear off, but the mathematics of the situation forbade it: we were still thirty clicks from the enemy base; fifteen hours’ marching at the least. And though one could stay awake and energetic for a hundred hours on the ’tabs, aberrations of judgment and perception snowballed after the second ’tab, until in extremis the most bizarre hallucinations would be taken at face value, and a person would fidget for hours, deciding whether to have breakfast.
Under artificial stimulation, the company traveled with great energy for the first six hours, was slowing by the seventh, and ground to an exhausted halt after nine hours and nineteen kilometers. The teddy-bears had never lost sight of us and, according to Lucky, had never stopped “broadcasting.” Cortez’s decision was that we would stop for seven hours, each platoon taking one hour of perimeter guard. I was never so glad to have been in the Seventh Platoon, as we stood guard the last shift and thus were the only ones to get six hours of uninterrupted sleep.
In the few moments I lay awake after finally lying down, the thought came to me that the next time I closed my eyes could well be the last. And partly because of the drug hangover, mostly because of the past day’s horrors, I found that I really just didn’t give a damn.
14
Our first contact with the Taurans came during my shift.
The teddy-bears were still there when I woke up and replaced Doc Jones on guard. They’d gone back to their original formation, one in front of each guard position. T
he one who was waiting for me seemed a little larger than normal, but otherwise looked just like all the others. All the grass had been cropped where he was sitting, so he occasionally made forays to the left or right. But he always returned to sit right in front of me, you would say staring if he had had anything to stare with.
We had been facing each other for about fifteen minutes when Cortez’s voice rumbled:
“Awright, everybody wake up and get hid!”
I followed instinct and flopped to the ground and rolled into a tall stand of grass.
“Enemy vessel overhead.” His voice was almost laconic.
Strictly speaking, it wasn’t really overhead, but rather passing somewhat east of us. It was moving slowly, maybe a hundred clicks per hour, and looked like a broomstick surrounded by a dirty soap bubble. The creature riding it was a little more human-looking than the teddy-bears, but still no prize. I cranked my image amplifier up to forty log two for a closer look.
He had two arms and two legs, but his waist was so small you could encompass it with both hands. Under the tiny waist was a large horseshoe-shaped pelvic structure nearly a meter wide, from which dangled two long skinny legs with no apparent knee joint. Above that waist his body swelled out again, to a chest no smaller than the huge pelvis. His arms looked surprisingly human, except that they were too long and under-muscled. There were too many fingers on his hands. Shoulderless, neckless; his head was a nightmarish growth that swelled like a goiter from his massive chest. Two eyes that looked like clusters of fish eggs, a bundle of tassles instead of a nose, and a rigidly open hole that might have been a mouth sitting low down where his Adam’s apple should have been. Evidently the soap bubble contained an amenable environment, as he was wearing absolutely nothing except a ridged hide that looked like skin submerged too long in hot water, then dyed a pale orange. “He” had no external genitalia, nor anything that might hint of mammary glands.
Obviously, he either didn’t see us, or thought we were part of the herd of teddy-bears. He never looked back at us, but just continued in the same direction we were headed, .05 rad east of north.
“Might as well go back to sleep now, if you can sleep after looking at that thing. We move out at 0435.” Forty minutes.
Because of the planet’s opaque cloud cover, there had been no way to tell, from space, what the enemy base looked like or how big it was. We only knew its position, the same way we knew the position the scoutships were supposed to land on. So it could easily have been underwater too, or underground.
But some of the drones were reconnaissance ships as well as decoys; and in their mock attacks on the base, one managed to get close enough to take a picture. Captain Stott beamed down a diagram of the place to Cortez—the only one with a visor in his suit—when we were five clicks from the base’s “radio” position. We stopped and he called all of the platoon leaders in with the Seventh Platoon to confer. Two teddy-bears loped in, too. We tried to ignore them.
“O.K., the captain sent down some pictures of our objective. I’m going to draw a map; you platoon leaders copy.” They took pads and styli out of their leg pockets, while Cortez unrolled a large plastic mat. He gave it a shake to randomize any residual charge, and turned on his stylus.
“Now, we’re coming from this direction.” He put an arrow at the bottom of the sheet. “First thing we’ll hit is this row of huts, probably billets, or bunkers, but who the hell knows…our initial objective is to destroy these buildings—the whole base is on a flat plain; there’s no way we could really sneak by them.”
“Potter here. Why can’t we jump over them?”
“Yeah, we could do that, and wind up completely surrounded, cut to ribbons. We take the buildings.
“After we do that…all I can say is that we’ll have to think on our feet. From the aerial reconnaissance, we can figure out the function of only a couple of buildings—and that stinks. We might wind up wasting a lot of time demolishing the equivalent of an enlisted man’s bar, ignoring a huge logistic computer because it looks like…a garbage dump or something.”
“Mandella here,” I said. “Isn’t there a spaceport of some kind—seems to me we ought to….”
“I’ll get to that, damn it. There’s a ring of these huts all around the camp, so we’ve got to break through somewhere. This place’ll be closest, less chance of giving away our position before we attack.
“There’s nothing in the whole place that actually looks like a weapon. That doesn’t mean anything, though; you could hide a bevawatt laser in each of those huts.
“Now, about five hundred meters from the huts, in the middle of the base, we’ll come to this big flower-shaped structure.” Cortez drew a large symmetrical shape that looked like the outline of a flower with seven petals. “What the hell this is, your guess is as good as mine. There’s only one of them, though, so we don’t damage it any more than we have to. Which means…we blast it to splinters if I think it’s dangerous.
“Now, as far as your spaceport, Mandella, is concerned—there just isn’t one. Nothing.
“That cruiser the Hope caulked had probably been left in orbit, like ours has to be. If they have any equivalent of a scoutship, or drone missiles, they’re either not kept here or they’re well hidden.”
“Bohrs here. Then what did they attack with, while we were coming down from orbit?”
“I wish we knew, Private.
“Obviously, we don’t have any way of estimating their numbers, not directly. Recon pictures failed to show a single Tauran on the grounds of the base. Meaning nothing, because it is an alien environment. Indirectly, though…we can count the number of broomsticks.
“There are fifty-one huts, and each has at most one broomstick. Four don’t have one parked outside, but we located three at various other parts of the base. Maybe this indicates that there are fifty-one Taurans, one of whom was outside the base when the picture was taken.”
“Keating here. Or fifty-one officers.”
“That’s right—maybe fifty thousand infantrymen stacked in one of these buildings. No way to tell. Maybe ten Taurans, each with five broomsticks, to use according to his mood.
“We’ve got one thing in our favor, and that’s communications. They evidently use a frequency modulation of megahertz electromagnetic radiation.”
“Radio!”
“That’s right, whoever you are. Identify yourself when you speak. So, it’s quite possible that they can’t detect our phased-neutrino communications. Also, just prior to the attack, the Hope is going to deliver a nice dirty fission bomb; detonate it in the upper atmosphere right over the base. That’ll restrict them to line-of-sight communication for some time; even those will be full of static.”
“Why don’t…Tate here…why don’t they just drop the bomb right in their laps? Would save us a lot of….”
“That doesn’t even deserve an answer, Private. But the answer is, they might. And you better hope they don’t. If they caulk the base, it’ll be for the safety of the Hope. After we’ve attacked, and probably before we’re far enough away for it to make much difference.
“We keep that from happening by doing a good job. We have to reduce the base to where it can no longer function; at the same time, leave as much intact as possible. And take one prisoner.”
“Potter here. You mean, at least one prisoner.”
“I mean what I say. One only. Potter…you’re relieved of your platoon. Send Chavez up.”
“All right, Sergeant.” The relief in her voice was unmistakable.
CORTEZ CONTINUED WITH his map and instructions. There was one other building whose function was pretty obvious; it had a large steerable dish antenna on top. We were to destroy it as soon as the grenadiers got in range.
The attack plan was very loose. Our signal to begin would be the flash of the fission bomb. At the same time, several drones would converge on the base, so we could see what their antispacecraft defenses were. We would try to reduce the effectiveness of those defenses wit
hout destroying them completely.
Immediately after the bomb and the drones, the grenadiers would vaporize a line of seven huts. Everybody would break through the hole into the base…and what would happen after that was anybody’s guess.
Ideally, we’d sweep from that end of the base to the other, destroying certain targets, caulking all but one Tauran. But that was unlikely to happen, as it depended on the Taurans’ offering very little resistance.
On the other hand, if the Taurans showed obvious superiority from the beginning, Cortez would give the order to scatter: everybody had a different compass bearing for retreat—we’d blossom out in all directions, the survivors to rendezvous in a valley some forty clicks east of the base. Then we’d see about a return engagement, after the Hope softened the base up a bit.
“One last thing,” Cortez rasped. “Maybe some of you feel the way Potter evidently does, maybe some of your men feel that way…that we ought to go easy, not make this so much of a bloodbath. Mercy is a luxury, a weakness we can’t afford to indulge in at this stage of the war. All we know about the enemy is that they have killed seven hundred and ninety-eight humans. They haven’t shown any restraint in attacking our cruisers, and it’d be foolish to expect any this time, this first ground action.
“They are responsible for the lives of all of your comrades who died in training, and for Ho, and for all the others who are surely going to die today. I can’t understand anybody who wants to spare them. But that doesn’t make any difference. You have your orders, and what the hell, you might as well know, all of you have a posthypnotic suggestion that I will trigger by a phrase, just before the battle. It will make your job easier.”
“Sergeant….”
“Shut up. We’re short on time; get back to your platoons and brief them. We move out in five minutes.”
The platoon leaders returned to their men, leaving Cortez and the ten of us, plus three teddy-bears, milling around, getting in the way.
The Best Military Science Fiction of the 20th Century Page 15
