Soldiers

by John Dalmas

  "Centaurs?" Morgan muttered. Nothing horselike had climbed this. They must have used AG boats, he thought, or be more like goats than horses.

  Inside was dark, and musty with the smell of old death-of bodies scavenged and dessicated-and dried animal excrement. But his torch beam found no carnivores. They'd been there, done what they did, and left. Bones and tattered cloth were abundant, and all the bones were human. And the spacecraft had open hatches; the people aboard them had come out to fight.

  He went directly to his yacht, the Delight. She hadn't been destroyed, merely killed. The invaders had slapped magnetic "bombs" on the command panels of her bridge and engineering section, and fried her "brains." They'd also dug through all cabinets and lockers, but except for weapons, which were gone, they'd left the rest strewn around. Mostly they hadn't even taken the trouble to vandalize. Apparently if it didn't look dangerous, any damage was incidental.

  He entered his suite with concern, saw the carrying case opened and empty on the deck, and felt sharp fear. Then his torch beam found the telescope itself on the bed, where it had been tossed. He carried it out, set it up, and tried it. It was all right.

  Now to find some cordage, he thought. Putting the scope back in its case, he left with it.

  He spent the next day with Connie and Robert. Then he left again, this time with eight days' rations in his pack, the scope in its case slung on one shoulder, and, of course, a blaster on his hip. The scope weighed far more than all the rest of it, and was awkward. He'd take a break every hour, he told himself.

  He felt cheerful about the situation, and after leaving the zone of bombardment damage, made good progress. On the second afternoon he reached the prominence he'd climbed before, and started up the side away from the alien clearing. At the top, he selected the same scrubby tree he'd sheltered beneath before, and set up the scope in its shade. Here lay a certain risk. He'd brought his belt recorder, and both it and the scope were powered by power slugs. If the invaders were monitoring the electronic environment, they might just possibly detect them, though it seemed doubtful.

  Setting the scope at 10X, he focused on the distant opening. It had rained, enough to soak out the fires and lay the dust. He began scanning, increasing and decreasing magnification as needed, pausing to describe anything that seemed worthwhile. His voice activated the recorder. Building construction continued. Here and there large machines-crawler tractors!-moved across the clearing, apparently cutting the coarse root network of the cleared forest. The activity left little question: the aliens planned to stay, and grow crops.

  He focused on one who appeared to be a supervisor. It stood sideways to the telescope, watching builders at work, seeming to comment to a recorder of its own. The long head had upright ears, and overall it had reddish-brown fur. Prieto had said they looked like "centaurs from the Jurassic." He should have said Miocene, Morgan thought, or whatever period it was when Terran mammals were trying out bizarre body forms. He was pretty sure, though, that there'd been no six-limbed mammalian species in Terra's history.

  It hadn't occurred to him to bring a vid. He didn't realize he could let Connie view the cube, and the prime minister's savant would see what she was seeing, via Robert.

  So he described the alien in words, portraying the features of face and harness, the articulation of the limbs, and the four fingers and two thumbs on each hand. The feet were obscured by vegetation. From what he could see, the teeth were "cone-shaped and not particularly large," but the back teeth could be different.

  Then the creature strolled to one of the buildings being assembled, and disappeared inside. Morgan shifted focus to another alien then, this one the color of wet sand. It stood on a gently sloping roof, using what appeared to be some sort of spot-welder. The feet had two splayed toes, suggesting a camel's but with heavy claws. Blunt claws, he thought, for traction instead of fighting.

  He thought of measuring its height, but that required knowing its distance, and this was not the place to use his range finder. Use your map, and estimate, he decided. His computer made the worker's height twenty-eight inches at the withers. He couldn't get a figure for height to the top of the long skull; torso and neck were bent forward, eyes on its work.

  "Not as big as I thought," he said, "and not horselike at all." Again reducing magnification for scanning, he found a dozer piling sections of fallen trees. As Morgan watched, the operator began flailing its arms, and jumped from the driver's platform with the dozer still running. Its legs gave as it hit, but it was back on its feet in an instant, arms still flailing, hind feet kicking.

  Morgan stared. The machine, he realized, had disturbed a nest of Tagus's version of hornets. The operator's dance became extreme, then it fell, limbs thrashing. Quickly Morgan increased magnification till he could glimpse the hornets, big as his thumb joint, strafing the invader until its limbs went slack, and its head flopped sideways on the ground.

  "Jesus!" Morgan murmured. He'd been stung a few times himself-twice just the day before; presumably he'd gotten too near a nest. It hurt like hell when they hit, but it hadn't laid him low like that. Of course, from what he could see, the alien had gotten stung a lot more than twice. But still…

  He cut magnification, and scanned for reactions by other workers who might have seen it happen. Two had left their machines, each holding what might have been a spray can, but instead of running to help their comrade, they watched from a distance, moving nervously, apparently anxious, as if they wanted to move in, but were afraid. Morgan reported that, too.

  He continued scanning and recording for another half hour, feeling increasingly edgy. Abruptly then he made a decision, and after disassembling the scope, packed it in its padded case. Then he loaded his gear on his back and picked his way carefully down the knob. At the bottom he stashed scope and case beneath the trunk of a large fallen tree, and set out for home.

  If I hike till deep dusk, and get an early start in the morning, I can get back to Robert and Connie by noon, he thought. And debrief myself to the PM and the military.

  It seemed very important.

  Chapter 13

  Language Lesson

  David MacDonald heartily disliked the awkward commode they were expected to use. It was ill-suited for humans: a dry ceramic box perhaps sixteen inches high, and wide enough for two of the alien invaders to back up to at once. He sluiced it clean with the hose provided, then in lieu of paper, hosed his behind with a needle-spray setting. He wondered how the aliens managed to hose their rears. Probably they didn't, he decided. Their arms were too short. And horses got by without it, and dogs.

  Fortunately, alien hygiene arrangements included soft soap in bowls, and he made use of it now. He didn't particularly like making a spectacle of himself for the multilens monitor that left no part of their cell unobserved. When they'd wakened on the shuttle that had brought them to this-station? ship?-they were naked. But of course their captors were naked too, except for equipment harness.

  He looked at Yukiko, sitting cross-legged on the other side of the room on a sort of futon. Annika lay still and pale, her head cradled on his wife's lap. Yukiko stroked the girl's short, blond, cap-cut hair, crooning softly to her. That the savant had been captured told him that even with no exposed structures, the Cave Bay station had been discovered. Probably from its electronics signature. And the Cousteau had obviously not gotten offworld, because Annika would have been on it.

  Ju-Li would have fought a squad of hyenas to protect her, so the others must be dead, he thought. Yukiko agreed. Probably Dennis had sent the others out hunting for them, when they all should have been headed outsystem in warpdrive.

  David shook his head. He and Yukiko were together, and when they'd been put aboard the shuttle, Annika had been given into their care. If any of the others had been taken alive, it seemed to him they'd all be together. The only apparent alternative was for each human to be held in solitary, and obviously they weren't.

  "How's she doing?" he asked.

  "
Fine," Yukiko answered. Her attention remained on Annika. "Just fine. Annika knows we're with her, taking care of her. Don't you, darling?" she crooned, and continued to stroke. "She's just resting her eyes. She looked at me a minute ago."

  David didn't take his wife's words at face value. She'd said what she had at least partly to sooth Annika, reassure her. It might take quite a bit of that before the child came out of whatever state she was in: a coma or stupor-whatever. The child. It occurred to him he didn't know how old Annika was. Eleven or twelve, he guessed, but mentally equivalent to four or five. If "equivalent" meant anything in cases like this.

  A sound caught David's attention, and he turned. The door was sliding open, and two aliens looked in from the corridor, sidearms in hand, long reptilian jaws closed. The eyes were squarely in front, presumably providing binocular vision.

  The weapons, David guessed, were stunners of some sort. But not the variety familiar from crime dramas; he and Yukiko had been stunned while being picked up on the islet, and there'd been no hangover. "Look who's here," David said. "The hyena twins, Ugly and Uglier." His eyes were intent on their faces, which he could not read. But he got an impression of wariness, as unlikely as it seemed. The two walked through the door, then stepped aside. A third one, larger, walked in between them, seemingly unarmed. The first two were reddish brown. This one had vivid blue sides; the upright torso and head were teal blue. The face was marked with red, and the seemingly clipped crest was scarlet. To David's eyes the colors seemed natural. Its own eyes intent on David, the latecomer spoke, the words recognizable despite very approximate pronunciations. "How do you feel?" it said. The eff sound was approximate.

  It's got no lips, David realized. The alien's eyes were on him, and for a moment David thought the creature wanted to know. But then it answered its own question. "I felt vetter."

  Before he got it all out, the creature's gaze had moved to Yukiko. "How do you suffose I feel?" it said, then answered its own question. "Cratty." It looked from one human to the other, then made what might have been a smile, and touched its upright torso where its heart might might have been but almost certainly wasn't. "Qonits," it added. "Qonits!"

  "Yukiko," Yukiko answered promptly, and touched her chest.

  Ah-ha. It's begun, David thought. He remembered now: the first sentence had been what he'd asked Yukiko when she'd wakened-"How do you feel?"-and the follow-up had been her reply. "Cratty" was as close as their interrogator could come to "crappy." The aliens had been monitoring more than their movements. They'd recorded their words, run an audio analysis, then this one had practiced the Terran phonemes, words, and sentences. They wanted to learn the language.

  The chain of realizations had been more rapid than speech; the oceanographer didn't miss a beat. "David," he said, touching his thatched chest.

  It was indeed the beginning. There was a wall table in the room, its height suitable for an alien to work at, but too low for a standing human; David and Yukiko would have to kneel. Qonits stepped to it and gestured. Gently Yukiko laid Annika's head down on the futon, and whispered to her. Then she and David joined the alien, who promptly walked the four fingers of one hand along the table's surface, and made a sound. Probably the word for walk, David decided. He repeated it back as best he could, and walked two of his own fingers on the table, human-style. "Walk," he said.

  The alien repeated the word he'd used, and both adult humans tried to duplicate it. The alien's eyes were unreadable. Again David's two human fingers walked along the table. "Walk!" he repeated, forcefully this time. "Walk! Walk!"

  The alien tried it again, and David glowered deliberately, wondering what, if anything, the alien made of human facial expressions. Shaking his head, he galloped his fingers along the surface. "Run! Run! Run!" he barked.

  The alien stared, appraisingly it seemed, then walked his fingers again. "Wahk," he said. "Wahk. Wahk."

  David didn't let him get by with that. "Walk!" he snarled, "not wahk! You're not a duck, you're a goddamn… " He paused. "Hyena!"

  When Qonits left, some while later, he'd learned not only run and walk, but hungry, eat, drink, scratch, wash, bathe, breathe, heart, urinate, and defecate. He could also count to ten. And considering the undoubted differences in his vocal apparatus, approximated the sounds rather well.

  He'd also proven a quick study, which did not greatly cheer the oceanographer. David had no doubt the words were recorded in the ship's computer, but what it might make of them, he had no idea. Not much, he guessed. Not yet. It lacked the workhorse words: is and are and were; you and me; but and and; here and there… But it was a beginning. Meanwhile, he'd established a kind of fragile dominance, though what good it might be, he had no idea.

  Chapter 14

  Goosing the Tiger

  Drago Dravec had learned something: that a near-suicide mission weeks away can be planned more or less matter-of-factly, but close at hand it was a meaner breed of cat. Not that he was thinking of backing out. But here he was, newly emerged in the far fringe of the Hibernia System-in its cometary cloud-with only two of his three other ships. Several minutes had passed with no sign of Indio Fuentes and the Aztec, and even after one minute, the odds of their showing had become microscopic.

  That son of a bitch! he thought, but without heat. Fuentes, a skilled captain, had been with them eight hyperspace hours earlier, when they'd emerged to compute their approach shot. Now he wasn't.

  So they'd do it without him. Drago realized how lucky he was that Bachelor and Ludmilla had hung tough. He was asking a hell of a lot.

  Drago pulled his attention to his sensor reads. He was always better at disconnecting from his emotions than at dealing with them. From time to time they'd pop up later, unbidden and out of context. That was a major reason even he was sometimes surprised by his actions; even jerked by them.

  He tended to cherish those unexplained surprises. He'd told himself more than once they kept life interesting. He'd even told his probation counselor that once, at the Academy. The guy's comeback had been, "Don't fall in love with your faults, Drago. It's like sleeping with rattlesnakes." But Drago hadn't taken the psych seriously. He felt confident in his intentions, and in his ability to make things turn out right.

  The main thing that had gotten him in trouble over the years was liquor, and he'd become good at refusing drinks. He'd said more than once, "A couple of drinks and even I don't know what the hell I might do." He didn't allow booze aboard ship, except for his crew's rum ration-three ounces at supper, actually 50/50 rum and water. And he left even that alone. Didn't even keep a bottle in his room back at Tagus, though he'd sometimes share a drink with Lu, his base wife.

  His sensors showed him the location of the aliens' system defense force, in the planetary fringe roughly 90 degrees from the primary, some 11 billion miles insystem. While close to the colony was a smaller force, probably a planetary guard flotilla. Unless they had more sensitive hyperspace emergence detectors than human technology had come up with, which seemed doubtful, there was a good chance they hadn't picked up the emergence of his own three small craft.

  And his EM signature wouldn't arrive with them for seventeen hours, so he radioed his other two commanders.

  "Fuentes isn't going to show," he said, "so we'll do it without him. Give me your location fixes on the system defense force."

  They did. Both agreed with his.

  "Okay. I'm going to let Kunming know we're here and set to go. Then, on my count, we'll move in, just as we planned. And good luck. A lot depends on us."

  He counted, then jumped.

  If warpspace emergence produced waves, no human devices had ever detected them. But from this close, the three pirates' electromagnetic signatures reached the aliens in microseconds. They'd already be icons on the alien screens. That's why they'd jumped to emerge between the system defense force and the Star of Hibernia. Hopefully they'd be mistaken for small members of the aliens' planetary guard.

  Drago had no way of knowing how close to
the system defense force he'd be on emergence-100 miles, 500, 1,000… It turned out to be 83. As planned, the pirate ships didn't pause to size things up. They could do that on the move. Nor did they break radio silence. Instead, as agreed earlier, the two subordinate pirate vessels began at once to move in gravdrive toward the alien battle group, neither hurriedly nor hesitently, as if this were routine. Drago followed more slowly, letting them open a larger gap. To sit motionless at a distance might bring questions he could neither answer nor read. Meanwhile he had the savant, and the responsibility to let War House know what he learned. Otherwise the mission would be wasted effort, and any lives lost, thrown away.

  On emergence, the Minerva's sensors and her shipsmind had begun recording everything they could perceive about the enemy. Not everything a warship would perceive, but a lot. On his screen, the alien formation showed as an array of icons. He locked his sensors on one of the five largest, its mass not greatly less than a loaded ore carrier. Surely a battleship. He called for an actual image, and magnified it against a scaling grid. She was huge! By comparison, the pride of the Admiralty, the prototype cruiser Yangtse, was a dwarf. Of the aliens' outriggers, the only one Drago could identify with confidence was the strange-space navigational sensor array. Others, less conspicuous, might or might not be communication equipment and targeting locks.

  His own small, base-made torpedoes were designed mainly as threats, though they could easily disable or kill a merchantman.

  So far his sensors had detected no changes in the alien radio traffic. To Drago even their code sounded somehow laconic. Hopefully this meant they'd accepted his three small craft as normal.