by Chris Bunch
“There’s a pair of ships — little ones — coming out of nowhere. Coming fast.”
The image on-screen showed six new, tiny ships near the merchantmen.
“Hovercraft, maybe,” Spada said.
“The merchantmen have countermissiles up,” nav said.
“Too late for one … a good, solid hit on its stern … two of our birds are out … jinking … I have some kind of launches from the escorts.”
An alarm shrilled.
“Overhead,” the man said, voice still calm. “Coming in on us.”
“Ambushed, by the Lord Harry,” Spada said, equally calm. He keyed a mike. “All Spada elements, take independent action, break contact, and reform at rendezvous point.”
That point, determined before they entered Shaoki space, was somewhere just inside the Khelat worlds.
Riss, with nothing to do, felt like chewing on her seat’s armrest.
Spada hit controls, put on power.
“I can’t jump out of this,” he said over his shoulder. “Those goddamned ships up there’d take us out in a second. And if we try to run …” he touched sensors.
“Ambush, indeed,” he said. “There’s five biggish ships coming out of Lafan. I think we stuck around too long.”
There were dull thuds above them — the hovercraft were dropping explosives.
“Any idea how much water we’ve got under us, navigator?”
“It just deepened out. Maybe … a thousand meters.”
“Well, God bless that. If we’d hit them in shallow water …” He let his voice trail off. “I knew there was a reason I was sitting on my thumbs.”
Spada sent the starship deep.
“Now where do we want to go?” he asked.
“Our target’s sinking,” the navigator reported.
“Forget about … no. Wait.”
Spada’s smile was meant to be fiendish, looked skull-like. “We’ll go under the bastard, which ought to foozle them. That’ll give us a straight shot at the open sea, and we can do our vanishing act.”
He put on more power.
One screen showed the looming bulk of the merchantman as it went underwater, turning upside down as it did.
Another screen lit, showing the sinking ship just overhead.
“A close one it’s going to be, yes, indeedy,” he said.
Then there was a scraping crash, and the patrol boat rocked sideways, then, stern first, started sinking, its drive screaming uselessly.
FORTY-SEVEN
Grok didn’t hang about waiting for the invasion, either.
His analytic work was pretty well finished for the moment — he didn’t anticipate intelligence suddenly discovering the Shaoki happened to have an extra fleet or assault army, just waiting around for something to do to worry him and Friedrich.
And he was feeling very, very stale. Plus, he’d picked out a very lovely target.
There was an easy entrance/exit: a large bordering lake and wilderness.
He’d found, and “borrowed,” an obsolete Khelat three-man ship, intended for covert operations. After some ripping, tearing, and rewiring, it just about fit Grok with his suit on, although the lock was a tight squeeze.
Grok had a pair of destroyers escort him to just off Thur, then made a solitary entrance as night fell on his target below, trying to think and look as much like a largish meteorite as possible.
Just in case anyone was tracking him, he put on a burst of power at about five thousand meters and zigged down to submerge in the lake.
Step one.
Step two was pushing himself out of the lock and surveying his transport.
It lay half-buried in the mud, and he’d stirred up enough silt in his landing that the ship should be covered within the day.
Very good.
He took various packs out of the ship and went on his way.
He was too heavy to float, so he waddled ashore and found the cave he’d been pretty sure about from aerial holos.
That would make a more-than-adequate hide.
If it was discovered while he was out, an alarm would alert him on his return, and he’d simply go back to the lake and home.
If searchers came on him while he was in the cave … Grok made an unpleasant face intended to mimic a human smile.
Heaven help them.
Grok’s target was Thur’s main military base, which handled everything from basic training for half a dozen systems to range qualifications, to officer candidate school to command and general staff school.
It stretched for thousands of square kilometers and covered every sort of terrain from desert to jungle. There were chambers to teach combat in space and underwater.
The main gate was dominated by a huge statue, called the Warrior, a particularly odious bronze of a man brandishing a sword in one hand, a blaster in the other. No one seemed to know what, if anything, it represented.
About two million men … against Grok.
The alien was almost sorry he had them so badly outnumbered.
The first order of business was to prowl the base. One thing Grok found very helpful in his nightlong wanderings was the military’s fondness for labeling things.
He paused at the assistant base commander’s house, noted some species of pet animal yowling to get in.
That was as good a place to start as any.
He waited.
In about an hour’s time, someone inside got tired of listening to the complaints and came to the door. It came open, and a muttering, balding man with atrocious taste in pajamas came out.
He didn’t even have a moment to realize what was looming up at him before he was silently dead.
Grok put the body over his shoulder and loped away.
He’d already noted where one of the post garbage recyclers was, and didn’t think anyone would consider the indignity of having the body of a colonel or general deposited in it.
He took care of the corpse, thought about calling it a night. But there were still a couple of hours before dawn.
Grok went to the armory for the Crew-Served Weapons Training Committee, and made an unobtrusive entrance. He then picked the lock on the weapons bay and went down the line of racked medium blasters.
Each barrel got tweaked very slightly, enough so at best it would explode, at worse none of the trainees would be able to hit anything, which would not increase their faith in Shaoki arms.
That was enough. Yawning, he found his way to his cave. Grok slept deeply, content in the knowledge of a job well done.
When he awoke, he treated himself to an excellent meal of frozen grubs, imported from his home worlds. He normally didn’t eat them around Star Risk, because they had a certain … aroma about them. But here, among the enemy? Just another reason to find the Unknown Monster, for such he’d dubbed himself, truly loathsome.
He dug a minuscule radio out of his gear and tuned it to what seemed to be the base audio station. It would be no fun at all if no one screeched at his depredations.
That accomplished, he went forth into the night.
One of Grok’s virtues was that no one could believe a being that big, that bulky, could move as silently as he did.
This night was for the general’s mess.
He pried open the back door, after having curled a massive lip at the nervous trainee walking sentry back and forth in front of the building, and put certain additives in various staples, from sugar to tea.
Some would merely make the consumer violently ill. Others would turn his teeth bright yellow. Still others would produce parabolic vomiting, or defecation.
The largest bulk of substances would kill, slowly, painfully, leaving no trace behind.
Grok spent the rest of the evening vanishing a sentry here and there, then went to his cave.
By noon his radio was screeching with panic-stricken news about Khelat assassins and murderers. There must be at least two full platoons of them, killing sentries and colonels and hiding somewhere on Thur.
Before sleeping, G
rok rumbled unhappily at what he considered the underestimation of his talents.
He’d found it more convenient, years earlier, to adjust his metabolism to that of the humans around him, although he could easily function for over one hundred hours without food or sleep.
But that made life easier.
He awoke to more howls from the radio. Little by little, he pieced things together.
A Khelat saboteur had been caught. He’d been posing as a trainee. During flamethrower training, he’d torched six recruits and three cadremen.
Grok puzzled about that, guessed that some poor idiot had panicked and frozen at the nozzle. And now he was a saboteur.
Grok almost felt sorry for him.
This night, he went out to the officers candidate school and crept into one building.
The candidates were paired up, two to a room.
Grok slithered into each room, a knockout spraygun in one hand, a knife in the other.
He slit every other candidate’s throat, then was gone.
He hadn’t had to use the spraygun at all, and felt a little proud.
Those prospective officers would not only have nightmares when they woke, seeing their assigned partner’s gore, but wonder why the murderers had only chosen one man or woman.
He burbled happily on the way back to his cave, and, full of benevolence, let two dozing sentries live.
Grok had an uncomfortable feeling, with no logical explanation for his paranoia, so he decided to trust it and moved to the back of the cave to sleep.
In the afternoon, he was wakened by the crash of branches, the subdued shouts of men.
He lay quite still, thinking neutral thoughts.
The sounds came closer, even into the mouth of the cave, then away.
Very good.
But he did think it was time to be moving on.
As soon as one — no, two — small tasks were accomplished.
The first was easiest, and, somewhat lightened, Grok went to the second.
That was at the commanding general’s home.
It was old-fashioned, lavish, two-story.
Grok almost thought the Shaoki believed their own scare tactics, for there was a grounded heavy lifter at each of the four compass points.
Men in pairs walked the rounds between them.
Grok sneered.
There was a light on.
Grok lifted himself up to one of the second story’s decks, which groaned alarmingly, but Grok thought it would hold him. A nearby window was latched, but not locked.
A thin, angled blade slid into its jamb, pried, and the window creaked open.
Grok froze, waiting to see if someone had heard the slight noise.
Nothing.
He looked inside, a little afraid that he’d pried into one of the bedrooms, and was about to leap in on someone’s chest.
It was a storeroom.
Grok went into the house, padded down a corridor, hearing three snores from as many rooms, went downstairs, toward the light.
The door was open.
It was a study, impressive in battle trophies, computers, and maps.
Inside, puzzling over a book, was a man who had to be the post general. No one less than that could look that imposing.
Grok was halfway across the room before the man looked up.
He scrabbled a desk drawer open, reached for a blaster, and slumped dead as Grok broke his neck.
Very good.
Grok pondered his next step.
He thought about going back upstairs and murdering the snorers — probably the late general’s wife and children. But he decided not — Goodnight was always cautioning him on overdoing things.
Still.
He took out his large combat knife and sliced off one of the corpse’s hands. That got a respectable spray of blood.
He painted, across one map, FREE THUR LIBERATION, then, on another chart, a rather abstruse symbol from his childhood.
That would add a certain confusion factor to the equation.
Then he carefully dissected the body.
Grok thought about eating some delicacies, such as the general’s liver and lights. But human flesh really didn’t agree with him. So he simply put these various parts in a pouch and decided those who came on the body could think anything they wanted, knowing humans always preferred the most vile.
And that was that for Thur.
He went back out the way he’d come, past the lifters and into the night.
An hour later, his ship blasted out of the lake and into space, far ahead of the AA batteries that fired wildly at nothing.
An hour after that, four shaped charges went off, and the statue of the Warrior toppled facefirst into the square it imposed on. The statue’s head snapped free from its neck, bounced twice, and demolished a guard shack and its occupants at the main gate.
Grok decided his small vacation had been time well spent.
FORTY-EIGHT
The engineer reached to cut the power.
“Carefully,” Redon Spada said. “We might need that sooner or later.”
The engineer reacted, then gingerly slid the drive pot about two-thirds back.
Riss hoped she didn’t look as scared as he did.
Redon Spada’s expression suggested he was taking a walk in a rather boring park.
He moved controls back, forth, but the tiny patrol ship continued — as far as Riss’s seat of the pants told her — sinking as it jerked to and fro, but remained still pinned.
Eventually, it sqwushed down on something — M’chel hoped it was the ocean floor — and something very large and heavy crashed down atop it.
“We appear to have arrived,” Spada said. “Somewhere. And it might appear that something is on top of us.”
Riss involuntarily glanced up.
“It won’t squash us, whatever it is,” Spada said. “The hull’s far too resistant for that. However, I do wish,” and his voice turned plaintive, “we had some sort, any sort, of gauges that might suggest what the blazes just happened.” He scanned the control board. “Ms. Riss, take a letter. Dear sirs, why don’t you people put depth gauges or sonar or radar sets that show things in millimeters away from the hull. I remain your dissatisfied customer, sincerely, and so on and so forth, from full fathoms five.”
“I’ve a theory,” Riss said. “Which I don’t like.”
“Try it.”
“Could that damned ship we sank have sunk on top of us?” M’chel asked.
“That’s foolishness,” Spada said. “But it’s the only sort of foolishness that fits.”
He unbuckled his safety harness, stood. The ship’s antigravity kept down firmly where it should be, even if that might not be the case on the outside.
“I suppose I should suit up and take a stroll to see what fix we’re in,” he said. “Unless someone happens to have an advanced degree in using space suits for diving?”
There were shakes of the head.
M’chel, wanting to stay a nice, comfortable coward but thought she was too afraid to do that, held up a hand.
“I’ve got a few thousand hours in suit drill.” She realized to her horror what her mouth was saying. “I’d better go.”
Now she wished for the old sexist days, when someone might stop her for gentlemanly reasons. But none of the other three in the p-boat’s control room moved.
Riss grunted, got up, and eeled herself into space gear.
“And here I go,” she said, moving into the lock and sliding the hatch closed behind her.
She cycled the lock, and its outer hatch came open with a great gush of water.
M’chel held on to a stanchion until the lock was flooded, then slowly moved outside.
She didn’t have to go far.
The patrol boat sat firmly on the bottom, half embedded, at a forty-five-degree angle.
The merchantman hadn’t gone down exactly on top of the p-boat, but when the missile hit, its anchor had come unstoppered and crashed onto and, so
mehow, around, the starship.
“Wonderful,” Riss muttered.
Then the ship had sunk on top of her.
All that would be necessary was to take a cutting torch to the anchor cable, and then the p-boat could bull its way to freedom.
• • •
Spada eyed Riss’s sketch of what lay outside.
“How nice,” he murmured. “Take another letter. Dear sirs, how dast you send out your little pickle boats without even the hint of a good argon double-throw-down anchor-chain cutting torch…. Well, at least one thing. We’ll die of boredom or starvation before the life-support systems run out.
“Anyone got any ideas?”
There was utter silence.
Riss had this sudden idea of herself, gray-haired and hobbling, taking her shift outside to work away with a hand file on that damned chain.
Then she had it.
It was an idea so stupid, so horrible, she frightened even herself.
She lined it out, and was not pleased to see equal looks of dread on the other three faces, even Spada’s. They sat in silence for a while, mulling her idea.
“I don’t see anything wrong with it,” the navigator-weapons officer said. “The fumes from the missile will gas us, the explosion will hull us, and that frigging chain will crush us.
“Come on. Let’s get on it.”
• • •
It took about two hours to slide one of the missiles out of its launch tube.
Using maintenance tools, they unshipped the warhead and then suited up. Using hand tools and terror, Riss, being the most experienced with explosives, cut the back of the warhead open.
Knowing little about whatever put the bang in the missile, she found a plastic bar that looked nonmagnetic and not sparky, and set to work, gingerly digging the explosive out and rolling it in sealed tubes.
While she was doing that, the other missiles were pulled from their launchers, and their command detonators removed. One command det trigger and one tube of explosives were combined.
Riss went back outside and clambered up on the hull, and found a kink in the chain.
She hooked her tiny bomb — the detonator was almost as big as the charge — up, and climbed down. She decided to stay outside, and backed off a suitable distance.
She had her radio on.
