“Sir!” she shouted, catching sight of him. “Glad you’re here! I had an idea I wanted to run past you.”
“Certainly, Meyers,” Daivid replied. “What do you have in mind?”
She tapped the side of her head with the infopad stylus. “Thinking like a Cockroach, sir. Disguise. You’ve got all those puppets disguising themselves as troopers, right?”
“Right.”
Her caramel-colored eyes shone. “Well, then, if you’re letting them dress up in our uniforms, then you have got to let us dress up as characters.”
Daivid’s mouth opened as his brain tried to compute the input it had just received. He shook his head. “Meyers, that’s silly.”
The procurement officer’s face lit up. “No, sir, it’s great! The enemy won’t know who’s a trooper and who’s not. Glaijet here says he can fit me out with one of the shells the puppet mechanisms haven’t been installed in yet. He thinks I’ll make a slagging great bear. I love bears!”
“More slag than bear,” D-45 grinned. “My squad’s been agitating for the same thing. I thought we’d come up with it first, but Meyers had already brought it to the costumers. It’s a terrific idea, sir. How better to hide trees than in a forest?”
“Trees don’t carry arms,” Meyers argued, laughing.
“They’ve got limbs; why not?”
The tailor made a note on a pad of his own. “Aqua fur, right?”
“Hold on!” Daivid said, hands out to halt the headlong tumble toward insanity. “I haven’t okayed the requisition yet.”
“Oh, you have to, sir,” Meyers pleaded. “It’s good strategy, and besides,” she added shyly, “I’ve always wanted to be a Wingle character.”
Daivid looked at D-45, who was looking sheepish. “I suppose you have a childhood fantasy you want to live out, too.”
The sharpshooter grinned. “Well, sir, I wouldn’t admit it where Boland could hear me.…”
“Boland?” asked Glaijet, and scrolled hastily through his notes. “Wants to be a yellow lion. Already talked to him. My people and I could stitch them up in no time, a lot faster than we can make those uniforms of yours.”
Daivid raised an eyebrow. “You know,” he said, “the more I hear the idea, the more I’m beginning to like it. Thinking like a Cockroach, of course. That would really throw the Insurgents’ minds off track. Yes, I like it.” He turned eagerly to the tailor. “Sew, Mr. Glaijet! Sew as though your life depended on it.”
O O O
“How could we have missed him in Rembert?” Ayala snarled, not for the first time, pacing the deck of the shuttle. The crew looked down at the controls. No one wanted to take the blame for having missed the multibillionaire inventor’s craft.
“Several ships took off from there at once, sir,” Oostern replied impassively, as he had often over the last two days. “We chose the one from which transmissions containing Wingle’s voice were issuing. You approved the pursuit.”
“It was a media ship!” Ayala shouted, his usually untidy hair in a complete whirlwind. “How could you not tell the difference between live broadcast and recorded data?”
The itterim on the bridge exchanged glances. The normally coldblooded colonel was losing his composure and becoming more irrational with every disappointment. He had not eaten much, or slept at all since losing track of the inventor. If he had been one of them, he’d be a candidate for eating. A pity human flesh was so unpalatable.
“The signals are identical, sir,” Oostern pointed out. “They are all digital transmissions. We traced all the other ships leaving the area.”
“Well, what was he traveling in?” Ayala demanded. “We never found him!”
The communications officer raised a foreleg. “I’ve got him, sir,” he said, pointing at his small screen. “The transmissions all emanate from one village. He’s less than two thousand miles from here, just inside the arctic circle. Look!” He touched a control, and the video appeared on the main screen. The familiar gray-moustached face smiled into the threedeeo pickup.
“… Glad to come and say hello to the good people of Coombly Halt. Say, it’s cold up here!”
The crowd around him laughed. A hearty, red-faced man in a puffy hood moved close to take Wingle’s gloved hand and pose for the cameras.
Ayala smiled. “He is still broadcasting. Get there. Now!”
The shuttle descended out of orbit so quickly that the skin shimmered with the heat of reentry. Ayala waited on the ramp until it touched down. He dashed out and began to push his way through the huge crowd gathered around the steps of the ice-covered building. When he reached them, they were empty.
“Where is Wingle?” he demanded. He caught the arm of the closest person. “Where did he go?”
“He shook my hand!” the middle-aged woman said, her eyes starry. “He is so nice!”
“He was here only a minute ago,” Ayala said, scanning the crowd. “Where did he go?”
“He said he’s on a goodwill tour,” the woman said, hugging herself. “It was such a surprise. He said he wants to thank everyone on Dudley for all we’ve done. It’s going to be a good season!”
“It’s going to be no season,” Ayala growled, then asked again, as patiently as he could. “Where did he say he was going from here?”
“Oh! I don’t know. But he was here!”
Ayala grunted and thrust himself away from her in disgust. He called Oostern on his communicator as he pushed his way back through the crowd toward the shuttle.
“Listen to the airwaves again. Find out where he is! I must have that device!”
O O O
Borden checked off the fourth list of names as the people boarded the red municipal transport vehicle. A big crowd had gathered around the gate of Wingle World
“We will contact you to return to Welcome just as soon as we can,” she assured the travellers, mostly children, who clutched suitcases and bags and wore woeful expressions. “You are bound for Rembert. The town council is expecting you. They have quarters prepared.”
“What if the Insurgents go back there?” a worried woman asked, herding two small children before her.
Borden gave her a thin smile. “They won’t, ma’am. Now that Mr. Wingle has departed from there, they won’t pay any attention to it. They won’t even have left sentries. They can’t waste time watching over what they consider a dry hole. You’ll be safe.”
Shaking her head, the woman boarded the big red hoverbus.
“You do realize the park is supposed to open in twelve days,” asked an elderly man with shaking hands.
“Yes, sir, I do,” Borden replied, meeting his watery brown eyes seriously. “We’re doing our best to make sure that will happen. Please find your seat.” A couple of the troopers came to assist him up the short ramp into the vehicle. Thielind came over to Borden and touched his infopad to hers.
“The fifth ’bus ready to go?” she asked.
“As soon as we’re sure Coombly Halt is clear,” he said. “What about the special ship?”
“That’s not going until the last minute,” Borden reminded him. “Not if we want it to be spotted.”
“It will be,” Thielind said, giving her his brilliant smile. “Streb and Parviz gave it a special paint job. That’s all part of thinking ahead. Thinking like a Cockroach.” He tapped the side of his head. “Lt. Wolfe has a way with words.”
“Do cockroaches think?” one of the Welcomers asked, with a face screwed up in disgust, lugging his duffle bag with difficulty past the officers.
“We sure do,” Thielind stated proudly.
The teenaged boy looked from one officer to the other. “You’re Cockroaches? What’s the matter? Were all the good nicknames taken?”
“Sir, that is a very old joke,” Borden began.
“Listen, friend,” Thielind interrupted, tapping the boy on the chest, “those bugs are resistant to radiation. They’re hard to kill. They seem to be smart. They’re strong. They have good survival instincts. Maybe they mak
e people sick to look at them, but you wait until after humanity and itterimity and all the others have blown themselves to hell. The next intelligent species to take over the spacelanes is gonna have six legs.”
“Please get on board, sir,” Borden said, as he stood gawking at them. She took his arm to turn him. “This transport leaves in two minutes.”
O O O
Daivid entered Wingle’s laboratory with trepidation. The inventor sat peering down into a sterile table that had the elbows of dozens of micromanipulators sticking out of it from every direction.
“He doesn’t want you here,” Sparky warned him, for the six hundredth time. Since being assigned to Daivid as a sort of aide-de-camp, the blond puppet had been a gadfly, a nuisance and an imposition, all of which he was being now.
“I need Mr. Wingle’s help,” Daivid said, turning to face the puppet with exasperation.
“Well, then?” Wingle’s voice came from behind him. “If you won’t take it from him, then you’d better take it directly from me. Go away.”
Daivid spun back to face the inventor with respect. “Sir, we have a strategic problem that we need to solve.”
The thicket of eyebrows drew down. “What is it?”
“The snow,” Daivid said, tersely, determined not to waste any of the man’s valuable time. “My plan calls for making use of the underground tunnels. Your engineers are laying them out in a pattern for us. The entrances are all well hidden, but they won’t stay that way if the enemy can follow our footsteps.” He held out his infopad, showing a chart on the screen. “I have plotted out the minimum number of paths, with a group of dead ends, to keep the Insurgents confused. Your staff seemed confused when I asked them if they could get the plows out today.”
The big brows rose on the forehead, and Wingle actually laughed. “Plows? Get with the century, young man.” Wingle took him by the elbow and led him to a control panel next to his communications console. “Do you think the snow obediently goes away at the start of season every year?” He pulled open a small gray door and clapped a knife-switch down. Daivid heard a violent crackling sound come from overhead.
“That’s ice melting,” Wingle said. “You can hear it through the ventilation ducts. In another hour or two it’ll be dry out there. Good enough?”
Daivid was filled with admiration. “More than good enough, sir. You think of everything.”
The crotchety old man seemed pleased with the praise, but still exasperated at the interruption. “Yes, well, we’ve had seven generations to work out the bugs. Any one of my people could have told you that they’d take care of it, if you asked them the right question. Now, get out of here. If I never see you again, it’ll be too soon.”
O O O
“This place is huge!” Lin exclaimed. Her voice echoed off the textured orange walls that stretched up three stories to the golden vaulted ceiling decorated with bosses shaped like clusters of carrot greens. Arched doorways over five meters high in each of the four walls let in the winter sunshine to illuminate the uneven plascrete cobbles of the floor. A three-tiered round dais rose in the center of the space. Every wall had brackets for hanging tapestries. Bunny Hug’s friendly face was carved into the walls above the doors and the pairs of arched windows above them, the ends of the exposed beams, even the finials on the long, burnished gold brackets intended to support tapestries on the high walls during season. Beyond each of the four doors were plascrete outlines a meter high that since the snow had vanished were revealed as garden planters shaped like Wingle characters. Lin supposed just before the park opened that they would be filled with flowers and plants from the immense greenhouses underground. She was very impressed by the park. It was vast, but like an iceberg only ten percent of its mass stood above ground. The support facilities had to reach nearly ten stories underground. The tourists would be blown away if they knew how much was there beneath their feet.
“We hold afternoon concerts in here,” said the grounds manager, Tomario Wassett. “It’ll hold fifteen thousand people standing, or six thousand seated. It’s big enough for almost any function.”
“Well, it’s too big for our purposes,” the senior chief said, setting her hands on her hips. “If we’re going to blast the Insurgents into a black hole, we’ve got to contain them in one fairly small place. I haven’t got enough explosives to seed this entire pavement.”
“Ma’am, you’re not going to blow up the Carrot Palace!” Wassett said in a hushed voice.
“I’m sure as hell going to try,” Lin said, scanning the structure with a practiced eye. She smiled patiently at the expression of horror on his face. “C’mon, we couldn’t possibly do as much damage as the tourists do. Now, show me where the support beams are located.”
O O O
“Awright, you scum!” Boland howled, standing tall at the head of a hundred Wingle Irregulars, as the troopers were coming to call their made-from-scratch brigade. “You, green elephant! Yeah, you!” he shouted, as a furry jade-colored pachyderm pointed an innocent trunk toward himself. “Yeah! Ginophant! You call that standing in line? The idea is that there’s someone in front of you, and you are in front of someone else. That way you’re not all walking side by side when I tell you to march!”
“Pretend you’re on parade,” Mose yelled from the head of the second wave. “Do it for the audience!”
“Oh!” the puppets all exclaimed in unison, as though they had just figured out what the big, fat trooper was trying to tell them. Obediently, they formed into two long files, and promenaded through the now-dry main street of Wonder Pavilion, waving at an imaginary cheering crowd.
“You guys suck,” Boland grinned.
“Don’t say such things, you naughty man,” a pretty twenty-something female chided him, slapping his hand as she sashayed by. Her dark blue uniform fit snugly over a pert bottom. Boland grinned, and stretched out to pinch.
“Careful,” Mose said, coming to stand beside his squad leader, “remember they’re not real people. She could be an elderly man with a squint.”
Boland sighed. “You sure know how to take the pith out of a guy’s reed.”
“You hear that, lieutenant?” Mose asked, as Wolfe approached them with Sparky at his heels. “I take the pith out of him.”
“Not in public, please, Mose,” the lieutenant said, with an eyebrow on high. “What you guys do in private is, thank God, none of my business.”
“Sir, you are like cold water upon the hot glass of my wit,” the poet said, with a theatrical sigh.
“Glad to be of service. How’s it going?”
“To be honest, they look weirder than we do,” Boland admitted, watching half a dozen pink flamingoes preening as they presented arms. They flaunted their skinny necks and fluttered long black eyelashes at Wolfe. “Almost terrifyingly weird, in my opinion. They’d scare hell out of any sane opponent, and it’ll be worse when they’re all dressed up. You can see they haven’t all got uniforms yet.” He gestured at a host of costumers on the sideline, who at the moment were fitting out Bunny Hug in his custom-made blues. The boots that went on over his enormous feet would have made good pontoons, and the clear helmet had to be made extra-extra large to accommodate his floppy ears.
“I’m not sure that’s going to matter,” Wolfe said, watching curiously. “The idea is to confuse the Insurgents as to how many ordinary soldiers we have, and then confuse them with a few of the special characters.” He did a quick count. “You’ve got about a hundred.”
“Only a few weapons, though,” Boland said. “We’ve got ten real guns, besides our own armaments, a few target pistols, about thirty fireworks guns, and two spare grenade launchers. I think that’s all I’m going to get.”
“You’ll have to make do,” Wolfe replied. “I’m leaving the largest contingent, along with the greatest number of Cockroaches, concealed around the Inventor’s Workshoppe with Aaooorru. The tunnels have been moved so there is only one access to Wingle’s workshop, the slide under the floor. He’s still
our primary focus. Are you going to be able to keep the Insurgents busy until they get to our little surprise?”
“Does this uniform make my tail look big?” one of the flamingoes asked, as they marched past the officers again.
Boland groaned. “That one’s the complainer,” he said. “They really do have their own personalities. And quirks. Yes, sir, we’ll do what you need us to do, if it kills all of us.”
Bunny Hug straightened his uniform and made straight for the small group of humans. “Little Daivid!” he cried, in the deep, friendly voice. “The last time I saw you, you were just this high!” The enormous pink paw flattened the air about a meter off the ground. “You’ve grown!” He threw his arms around Daivid and enveloped him in a huge hug. Privately, Daivid was charmed. To think that Bunny Hug would remember him after all those years, but then he and his sisters had been there a month … There was a loud snicker from the other Cockroaches. Daivid turned to glare at Boland and Mose. “Any other objections?”
“No, sir,” Mose assured him.
“I’m ready,” Bunny Hug said, and turned cheerfully to the assembled puppets with one big paw on high. “Everybody, into formation!”
Obediently, all the puppets lined up in perfect rows, without a single mistake or complaint. Boland and Mose looked at each other. “What’s he got that we haven’t got?”
“Respect,” Daivid said. “Earn it.”
O O O
The discipline problems were absent in the corlist’s contingent. He and Ewanowski had their two hundred and ten puppets, many of them armed with real machine guns, running complex maneuvers through the Little Village around the Inventor’s Workshoppe as if they had been doing it for years. Wolfe watched for a while as Aaooorru drilled his ten ‘officers’ in short-burst fire. His was the final defense, the last resistance. Wolfe had made sure to assign him puppets operated by the most skilled operators with the best motor control.
Strong Arm Tactics Page 34
