by Timothy Zahn
"The copters have lifted," Crane reported. "Heading northward, treetop height. Spotters tally six of them; one appears to be carrying a belly payload."
Six of the Conquerors' deadly combat helicopters, against three moderately armed Peacekeeper aircars and one troop carrier. The smart thing to do, Holloway knew, would be to order his people back aboard and get them out of there while he still could.
But that would mean abandoning the tectonic station to the enemy. A place with no military value whatsoever... unless it was in fact the hiding place for one of CIRCE's components.
And if it was, his job above all else was to keep that component from falling into enemy hands. Even if it cost the lives of his entire command.
He raised the comm and clicked it to the Copperheads' channel. "Copperheads: launch."
"Yes, sir," the calm voice of Lieutenant Bethmann acknowledged. A moment later, quiet and almost harmless-sounding in the distance, Holloway heard the rumble as the two Corvine fighters shot from concealment into the air.
Takara moved a step closer to his side. "You're taking one hell of a risk here, Cass," he murmured. "I hope you realize that."
"We have to take a stand somewhere, Fuji," Holloway said. "We're taking it here."
Takara seemed to digest that. "If you're looking for a showdown with those copters, I recommend we try to draw them out here into the mountains," he said. "The Corvines seem to have the edge in target ranging and blind-corner maneuvering - "
"I said we're taking our stand here."
A muscle in Takara's cheek twitched as he stepped back. "Yes, sir."
Holloway looked back at the monitor. "Tactical overlay," he ordered.
"Yes, sir." Crane keyed in the overlay, and a multicolored vector graph appeared superimposed on the nose-camera composite. The six enemy copters were hauling bear for the tectonic station, all right. Holloway did a quick mental calculation -
"They're going to beat the Copperheads there," Takara said tightly. "Probably by a good minute."
And a minute would be all it would take for those six copters to methodically slaughter every one of the Peacekeepers deploying from the troop carrier and possibly take out the aircars as well. Holloway clenched a hand into a fist, torn between the military necessity of driving the enemy away and his own instinctive protectiveness toward his troops -
And then, only a few hundred meters from their goal, the six red vectors abruptly shortened and shifted direction. "Copters slowing," Crane snapped. "Check that: faltering - looks like they're going to land right there in the trees. No; there they go again. Veering east... now veering east and south."
"I'll be dumped to a desk job," Takara said, a note of incredulity in his voice. "They're running back home."
Holloway let out a silent sigh of relief. He'd gambled his irreplaceable Copperheads and won.
Or at least hadn't yet lost. "Maybe their commander thinks like you do, Fuji," he said. "Trying to lure the Copperheads into range of his ground-based weapons."
Takara threw him a slightly uneasy look. "I trust you're not going to take him up on the invitation."
"Don't worry," Holloway assured him. "I'm not interested in any high-noon showdowns. If I can push the Zhirrzh out of the tectonic station, I'll be happy."
Takara grunted, looking back at the copter vectors, now definitely heading back toward the village. "Doesn't say much for their commander that he'd just abandon seven of his troops out there without a fight."
"Perhaps," Holloway said. On the other hand, if that tame ghost of Melinda Cavanagh's had been telling the truth about Zhirrzh life cycles, they might not even care all that much about physical death. "To me it says those copters are as valuable to him as our Copperheads are to us."
Takara cocked an eyebrow. "And as irreplaceable?"
"Could be," Holloway agreed thoughtfully. And if true, that might be the best flicker of hopeful news they'd had since the invasion. If the ground troops here were having trouble getting resupplied, it might mean the Zhirrzh invasion of the Commonwealth had stretched their war machine dangerously thin.
Or else it could mean they were having too much fun stomping Earth or Centauri to bother with this military equivalent of a flea bite. "Let's see just how nervous he is about losing them," he said, clicking on his comm again. "Copperheads: veer to intercept those copters. Don't actually pursue - just scare them a little. Be sure you stay out of range of those ground lasers."
"Acknowledged."
Holloway clicked off and peered at the monitor. The two Corvines, which had been flying a parallel close-wingtip formation at treetop height, shifted smoothly into high-low pursuit mode. Holloway shifted his attention to the copters and their superimposed vectors, watching closely for any sign of reaction -
And without warning a blaze of light flashed upward from the forest.
Catching the lower of the two Corvines directly across its nose.
7
Tbv-ohnor had insisted on going first into the underground structure, an order Klnn-dawan-a had put up only token resistance to. Standing away from the half-opened door, she watched as the three warriors cautiously slipped through. There were a few flickers of light as the beams from their hand lights reflected off the walls and doorjamb; and then Tbv-ohnor was back, poking his head around the edge of the door. "Looks clear, Searcher," he said. "Come on in."
The room was a large one, probably encompassing the entire underground structure, though measurements would have to be taken to confirm that. The beams from the hand lights swept across Human-Conqueror-style chairs and tables, a curved desk with a ring of darkened monitors facing an empty chair, and walls lined with tall, slender equipment cabinets. Some of the cabinets hummed softly, with small rows of colored lights set into their fronts, which glowed steadily or flicked on and off in complex patterns. Other cabinets stood quietly, with no indication as to whether or not they were functioning.
"Looks like some sort of command room," one of the warriors commented.
"Perhaps," Klnn-dawan-a said, looking behind her. There was a hand-sized panel with two small blue lights set into the wall just beside the door. She waved her hand over them without effect, then gingerly touched the rightmost light with a fingertip. She'd guessed correctly: abruptly the room was filled with a soft white glow radiating from hidden sources behind the cabinets.
A strange multiple stuttering sound came faintly from the direction of the stairway. "What was that?" she asked.
"Human-Conqueror projectile weapons," one of the warriors told her, moving to the door and looking up. "Better hurry, Searcher - I don't think we're going to have much time."
"Understood," Klnn-dawan-a said, feeling her tail speed up again as she crossed to the cabinet directly facing the monitor desk. That particular cabinet was also the one with the most flickering lights: fifty of them, laid out in a rectangular pattern of five rows with ten lights each. A row of Human-Conqueror letters was affixed beneath each of the lights, with other lines of letters in the cabinet's two upper corners. The cabinet itself was humming - a low, pervasive tone - and felt oddly cold to the touch. "Do any of the warriors on Dorcas understand the Human-Conqueror language?" she asked, pulling a field camera from her waist pouch and starting to photograph the letters.
"We all had a short orientation course before we got here," Tbv-ohnor said, stepping up beside her. "The written language ought to be programmed into our interpreter, though."
Another stutter of projectile gunfire from overhead wafted its way down the stairway. To Klnn-dawan-a's apprehensive ear slits, it sounded as if they were getting closer. "Here," she said, thrusting the camera into Tbv-ohnor's hands. "I want you to get me photos of all the cabinets. Pay particular attention to words and other lettering. I'm going to take a look inside this one."
"Right," Tbv-ohnor said, slinging his laser rifle and moving off across the room with the camera.
The front panel, Klnn-dawan-a quickly discovered, was an independent piece of metal, at
tached to the sides of the cabinet with a variant of the helical fastener that the Zhirrzh and every other race they'd come across had independently developed. One of the fingers of her manifold tool was the right size for the cruciform fastening slots of these particular helics, and in half a hunbeat she had the front panel off.
Given the obviously advanced state of Human-Conqueror technology, she had expected the equipment inside the cabinet to be highly complex. What she hadn't expected was the incredible extent to which that equipment had been miniaturized. Perhaps a hundred cables fed into the cabinet from openings in the back panel, snaking their way individually and in bundled groups to a mere six sites evenly spaced from top to bottom along the centerline. There the cables split into individual fibers of metal or glass, which vanished into the faces of small cubes suspended in midair by thick gray cylinders running horizontally across the cabinet. The cylinders themselves disappeared in turn through openings in the right and left walls, presumably into the cabinets on either side.
It was strange and very alien, and for a beat a disturbing vision flashed through Klnn-dawan-a's mind: that of a group of trillsnakes trying to swallow cube-shaped nornins, sculpted perhaps by some old neofacetist artisan.
Hastily, she chased the image from her mind. Considering what was going on above them, the last thing she wanted to think about was trillsnakes devouring nornins. Leaning halfway into the cabinet, she focused her light on one of the cubes, looking for some way to open it.
Surrounded by the pervasive hum of the cabinet, she never heard the footsteps that must have charged down the stairway. But suddenly Tbv-ohnor was there beside her. "Time to go, Searcher," he said urgently.
"Now?" Klnn-dawan-a asked. "But - "
"Now, Searcher," Tbv-ohnor snapped, grabbing her upper arm and yanking her bodily away from the cabinet. "The enemy's almost here."
Klnn-dawan-a's protests died at the back of her tongue. A few beats later they were all heading up the stairway.
"It might already be too late," Tbv-ohnor warned grimly as they clumped hurriedly up the steps. "Commander Thrr-mezaz pulled some trick that's keeping the Human-Conquerors' warcraft out of the sky in this area - I didn't get the details. But their ground warriors were already down, and the commander's reinforcements won't get here before they do."
"Maybe we should just stay down here," Klnn-dawan-a suggested, her tail spinning harder with the exertion of the climb. "If the room is that important to them, they won't risk damaging it. We could wait until it's safe to come out."
"Unless they prefer destroying it to letting us have it," Tbv-ohnor countered. "In which case they'll just roll some of their explosives down the stairway."
The stuttering sounds of Human-Conqueror weapons were getting louder, and as they neared the surface, Klnn-dawan-a could hear the hissing of laser rifles as the Zhirrzh warriors returned the fire. They reached the entrance chamber at the top of the stairs to find one of the warriors crouching beside each of the walls while the third, lying on the metal floor a stride back from the entrance, methodically sprayed laser flashes back and forth across his angle of fire. "Are they out there?" Tbv-ohnor asked as they reached the chamber.
"I don't know," the warrior at the right-hand wall said. "The Elders say they're not close enough to see us yet, but I keep seeing movement out there in the trees."
"Nothing that says Elders can't make mistakes," Tbv-ohnor grunted, moving up behind him and peering cautiously outside. "Especially with the kind of visual camouflage the Human-Conquerors like to use. Question is, how do we get around them?"
Klnn-dawan-a eased a stride forward. A dozen small smoldering fires and general haze of smoke could be seen throughout the area the third warrior was still sweeping laser fire across. "That question's going to be academic if you set the whole forest on fire," she warned.
"It'll also be academic if we let them get a straight shot in here," Tbv-ohnor retorted, throwing a glare at her over his shoulder. "Let us handle this, all right?"
Flicking her tongue, Klnn-dawan-a stepped back behind the warrior on the floor. As she did so, an Elder appeared just outside the outer doorway, almost invisible against the mottled light pattern of the forest. "Watch out, Warrior First," he warned. "Three of the enemy have reached firing position. The other twelve are still approaching, using what seems to be a modified closed-talon formation."
"What about the warcraft?" Tbv-ohnor asked.
"Commander Thrr-mezaz's scheme seems to have driven them from the area," the Elder said. "Only temporarily, though, I suspect. Our commander at the Battle of F'orshn on X'sin tried a very similar trick, and - "
"Then we need to break out now," Tbv-ohnor cut him off. "Give me targeting on those three warriors."
The Elder vanished, was back a few beats later. "The first is there," he said, pointing with his tongue. "Behind the large tree - he's looking around it to the left of the bole. The second and third are there" - he pointed again - "on either side of a half-buried boulder."
"Right," Tbv-ohnor said, hefting his laser rifle as the Elder vanished again. "Fhz-gelic, get up off the floor - we're going to want two shots on each target. All warriors: aim and fire on my command. Prepare - "
Abruptly, the Elder reappeared. "Warrior - wait. The enemy warriors have suddenly pressed themselves into the ground. They must know - "
" - now!" Tbv-ohnor barked, jerking his laser rifle into firing position. In perfect unison the other five warriors did the same -
And as they fired, the forest to their left seemed to vanish in a dazzling explosion.
Klnn-dawan-a staggered back with a scream, her midlight pupils stabbed with pain. A split beat later she was slammed hard onto the metal floor as the ground bucked like a wild animal beneath her feet and a roar of sound hammered across her body.
Her midlight pupils were still useless; cautiously widening her darklight pupils, she saw the remnants of what must have been a huge fireball rising above the nearest trees. "What happened?" her numbed ear slits heard her voice say.
But there was no answer. Cautiously lifting her head, she looked around her.
Her first horrible thought was that that single blast had raised all six of the warriors to Eldership. They lay on the floor at the front of the entrance chamber, unmoving, their laser rifles lying haphazardly across the floor or still held in limp grips. But even as she stared in rising panic, she saw Tbv-ohnor's left foot twitch and realized what had in fact happened. Standing at the outer door, mostly outside the limited protection of the entrance chamber, they'd been hit much harder by the light and shock wave of the explosion.
It wasn't as bad as she'd feared. But it was bad enough. Stunned warriors were no more capable of fighting than warriors who'd been raised to Eldership... and there were fifteen enemy warriors converging on them.
Which meant it was up to her. Pressing her tongue against the side of her mouth, fighting a sudden wave of nausea, she got to her knees and crawled across the floor toward the warriors.
Tbv-ohnor's tail had begun a sluggish undulation by the time she reached the nearest laser rifle. Getting a grip on the shoulder brace, she hauled it over to her, wondering uneasily whether her limited experience with handheld stingers would be any help in handling the vastly more powerful warrior weapon. Picking it up, she climbed to her feet and stumbled to the entrance.
And froze. There, not twenty strides away, a line of eight Human-Conquerors stood or knelt in their camouflage clothing. Their weapons pointing straight at her.
"Pull up, Vanbrugh!" Holloway barked into his comm as the laser beam raked across the Corvine's underside. "Pull up, damn it!"
"He can't," Takara bit out, waving a fist toward the display as the Corvine twisted violently to the right.
He was right, Holloway knew, watching helplessly as the Corvine slid even farther to the side. It was done for, with bare seconds left before either the enemy laser sliced it open or else it crashed onto the forest floor. He cringed in anticipation, wondering why
Vanbrugh and Hodgson didn't eject; realized an instant later that they had neither the time nor the altitude left to do so. They were going to die out there. Violently, uselessly, they were going to die.
"Look!" Takara said suddenly, jolting Holloway out of his horrified fascination with the doomed Copperheads. "Bethmann's coming back."
Holloway swore. Bethmann was coming back, all right. The second Corvine had veered around in a tight curve and was blazing full throttle back toward Vanbrugh's crippled fighter and the laser attacking it. Recklessly flying back into danger - "Bethmann, get out of there," Holloway snapped into the comm. "You can't help them now."
There was no answer... but even as Holloway started to repeat the order, he saw it was too late. The heavy laser had flicked away from the crippled Corvine, relinquishing the chance for a direct kill in order to deal with this new threat bearing down on it. Helplessly, Holloway watched as the brilliant beam came on again, grazing the flank of Bethmann's approaching fighter.
And then, abruptly, the Corvine's nose pitched violently upward, the movement all but killing its forward momentum. The laser swung wide, its operators caught off guard by the maneuver. For a split second the aircraft seemed to stand on its tail in midair, its underside blatantly exposed to the enemy. The beam checked its movement, tracked back toward its target -
And in a burst of Icefire the Corvine vanished.
"What the hell?" Takara said, blinking. "Where did it go?"
"It went up, sir," Crane said, sounding more than a little stunned himself. "Just straight up."
"Track him," Holloway ordered.
Crane keyed his board, and the monitor view pulled back and swung upward. Sure enough, there was Bethmann's Corvine, halfway to the stratosphere and just starting to curve over the top of his arc. "Incredible," Takara said. "There's a solid year's worth of dumb luck shot all to hell."
