The Far Stars War

by David Drake

  Then the warehouse light clicked on and I found myself standing in a bright room, empty except for the other five members of the mute hex. We all stared at each other in wonder.

  * * *

  It only took a few minutes for us to realize we’d all had the same experience. It had to be some kind of induced hallucination, but it felt real to all of us. What did it mean? What was the point?

  We stood outside the building. Morning was coming; false dawn was already past, and the black sky was going gray. We were all shaken.

  “Hey,” Glass said. “Trouble.”

  We looked. More than two dozen figures came from the trees across the compound.

  We looked at Tilt. If everybody felt the way I did, we were caught. I’d fight if he wanted, but my heart wasn’t in it. It didn’t matter.

  Tilt shook his head. He put his dartgun down. The rest of us did the same thing with our weapons.

  The troopers got closer.

  “It’s them,” Razor said. “The guys we killed. The ones at the perimeter and the four I did yesterday morning.” His voice was absolutely calm.

  I saw that it was true, and oddly enough, it didn’t bother me, either. The troopers showed no signs of any wounds, and they were smiling as they came toward us. We had killed them, they were dead, but there they were. It had to be an illusion. Had we really slaughtered them and was this a lie? Or had we only thought we’d killed them before and were they alive? Which way did the truth lie?

  “Oh, man,” Lout said. “What does it mean?”

  Tilt sighed. “It means we’re going to lose this war.”

  “No, not really,” came a voice from behind me. I didn’t need to turn to know it was Nobiki, but I looked anyway.

  “You’re going to forget this war,” he said.

  I stared at him.

  “I’m going back with you,” he said. He smiled.

  I got it, then.

  Nobiki was their edge. Somehow, he could give us what we wanted most. What our hearts most desired. We were the best our side had at killing, and he’d turned us into children. We’d come rolling in full of arrogance and technology, but we’d never had a chance. Was it from some chemical or biological agent? Some kind of radiopathic broadcast? Telepathy?

  It didn’t matter. If he could do that to us, the best, what could he do to anybody less?

  His edge was sharper than any of our own. How can you fight a man who will give you exactly what you want the most, and in so doing, will learn exactly who you are, and what buttons to push to control you? How can you fight that?

  We must have all understood the danger, for we killed him again. And again and again. But it didn’t matter, because he kept coming back. And that was not the worst of it.

  None of us can remember the name of the planet. Nobody remembers sending us there. Maybe it never even happened, but I think it did. I think there is a world out there we were made to forget, only I can remember part of what happened there.

  I think I remember it.

  THE GERIN are octopoid amphibians with a very hierarchical society, one with very strong ideas of warrior honor, but a demonstrated lack of compunction about killing off civilian populations. As amphibians, they are especially good at 3-D warfare, and have therefore a natural advantage in air and space combat. Like most amphibians, they are territorial and fiercely defend their breeding grounds, though instinctively they are otherwise limited in their aggressive defense to the bottoms of whatever body of water they’re in. This is again shown by the suicidal attacks of the Gerin civilians and the few marines who actually landed on Gerin Prime.

  The Gerin tend to attack defended positions, and are surprisingly inept at mobile land warfare. They see the defended position as a challenge to their authority and hence a threat, whereas a land force in motion is considered to be composed of inferiors and so a lesser threat. Human ground forces quickly learned that if you want the Gerin to attack, simply stop and dig in.

  The Gerin’s aquatic origins are also reflected by their preference for concussive artillery and explosive shells. Shrapnel slows rapidly in water and was never extensively used. While they use laser and other beam weapons in space battles, their weapon of preference is the missile.

  The Gerin response to an invasion from space is highly peculiar to human notions of tactics. As long as the shuttles are in the air, the Gerin attack them viciously. A grounded shuttle disgorging troops gives a confusing picture. They are “down” with respect to the space and air ships, meaning they have a high status, making them hesitate to attack. To the Gerin ground forces, which instinctively gravitate to lower elevations, the marines are above and so have a lower status. In this same way, the Gerin tend to retreat down, rather than away, whenever there is an option. The status of a landed shuttle is undetermined until the troops take up a position, offering a definite challenge, or move slowly away from the Gerin, thus forfeiting the right to a challenge, and so they are often left unmolested.

  Two-dimensional tactics are not a Gerin strong point.

  Again, while much of their combat is ruled by the instincts, they have little programming for handling a situation with an up or down dimension. Often they fail to see opportunities that are apparent to humans. For an amphibian, the higher you go, the farther you are from a defensible position and the more desirable water. Even though military logic may state that the higher ground gives an advantage, the Gerin tend to send lower-status forces up first.

  POLITICS is always lousy in these things. Some guy with rank wants something done, and whether it makes any sense or not, some poor slob with no high-powered friends gets pushed out front to do it. Like Mac . . . he wants a fuzzball spit-polished, some guy like me will have to shave it bare naked and work it to a shine. Not that all his ideas are stupid, you understand, but there’s this thing about admirals—and maybe especially that admiral: no one tells ‘em when their ideas have gone off the screen. That landing on Caedmon was right out of somebody’s old tape files, and whoever thought it up, Mac or somebody more local, should’ve had to be there. In person. In the shuttles, for instance.

  You know why we didn’t use tanks downside . . . right. No shields, Nothing short of a cruiser could generate ‘em, and tanks are big enough to make good targets for anyone toting a tank-bashing missile. Some dumb ass should have thought of shuttles and thought again, but the idea was the cruisers have to stay aloft. No risking their precious tails downside, stuck in a gravity well if something pops up. Tradition, you know? Marines have been landed in landing craft since somebody had to row the boat ashore. Marines have died that way just about as long.

  Now on Caedmon, the Gerin knew we were coming. Had to know. The easy way would’ve been to blast their base from orbit, but that wouldn’t do. Brass said we needed it, or something. I thought myself it was just because humans had had it first, and lost it; a propaganda move, something like that. There was some kind of garbage about how we had this new stealth technology that let the cruisers get in real close, and we’d drop and be groundside before they knew we were there, but we’d heard that before, and I don’t suppose anyone but the last wetears in from training believed it. I didn’t, and the captain for sure didn’t.

  He didn’t say so, being the hardnosed old bastard he is, but we knew it anyway, from the expression in his eyes, and that fold of his lip. He read us what we had to know—not much—and then we got loaded into the shuttles like so many cubes of cargo. This fussy little squirt from the cruiser pushed and prodded and damn nearly got his head taken off at the shoulders, ‘cept I knew we’d need all that rage later. Rolly even grinned at me, his crooked eyebrows disappearing into the scars he carries, and made a rude sign behind the sailor’s back. We’d been in the same unit long enough to trust each other at everything but poker and women. Maybe even women. Jammed in like we were, packs scraping the bulkheads and helmets smack onto the overhead, we had to l
isten to another little speech—this one from the cruiser captain, who should ought to’ve known better, only them naval officers always think they got to give marines a hard time. Rolly puckered his face up, then grinned again, and this time I made a couple of rude gestures that couldn’t be confused with comsign, but we didn’t say anything. The navy puts audio pickups in the shuttles, and frowns on marines saying what they think of a cruiser captain’s speechifying.

  So then they dropped us, and the shuttle pilot hit the retros, taking us in on the fast lane. ‘Course he didn’t care that he had us crammed flat against each other, hardly breath room, and if it’d worked I’d have said fine, that’s the way to go. Better a little squashing in the shuttle than taking fire. Only it didn’t work.

  Nobody thinks dumb marines need to know anything, so of course the shuttles don’t have viewports. Not even the computer-generated videos that commercial shuttles have, with a map-marker tracing the drop. All we knew was that the shuttle suddenly went ass over teakettle, not anything like normal reentry vibration or kickup, and stuff started ringing on the hull, like somebody’d dropped a toolshed on us.

  Pilot’s voice came over the com, then, just “Hostile fire.” Rolly said, “Shut up and fly, stupid; I could figure out that much.” The pilot wouldn’t hear, but that’s how we all felt. We ended up in some kind of stable attitude, or at least we weren’t being thrown every which way, and another minute or two passed in silence. If you call the massed breathing of a hundred-man drop team silence. I craned my neck until I could see the captain. He was staring at nothing in particular, absolutely still, listening to whatever came through his comm unit. It gave me the shivers. Our lieutenant was a wetears, a butterbar from some planet I never heard of, and all I could see was the back of his head anyway.

  Now we felt reentry vibration, and the troop compartment squeaked and trembled like it was being tickled. We’ve all seen the pictures; we know the outer hull gets hot, and in some atmospheres bright hot, glowing. You can’t feel it, really, but you always think you can. One of the wetears gulped, audible even over the noise, and I heard Cashin, his corporal, growl at him. We don’t get motion sickness; that’s cause for selection out. If you toss your lunch on a drop, it’s fear and nothing else. And fear is only worthwhile when it does you some good—when it dredges up that last bit of strength or speed that we mostly can’t touch without it. The rest of the time fear’s useless, or harmful, and you have to learn to ignore it. That’s what you can’t teach the wetears. They have to learn for themselves. Those that don’t learn mostly don’t live to disagree with me.

  We were well into the atmosphere, and dropping faster than my stomach liked, when the shuttle bucked again. Not a direct hit, but something transmitted by the atmosphere outside into a walloping thump that knocked us sideways and half over. The pilot corrected—and I will say this about the navy shuttle pilots, that while they’re arrogant bastards and impossible to live with, they can pretty well fly these shuttles into hell and back. This time he didn’t give us a progress report, and he didn’t say anything after the next two, either.

  What he did say, a minute or so later, was “Landing zone compromised.”

  “Landing zone compromised” can mean any of several things, none of them good. If someone’s nuked the site, say, or someone’s got recognizable artillery sitting around pointing at the strip, or someone’s captured it whole (not common, but it does happen) and hostile aircraft are using it. What “Ianding zone compromised” means to us is that we’re going to lose a lot of marines. We’re going to be landing on an unimproved or improvised strip, or we’re going to be jumping at low level and high speed. I looked for the captain again. This time he was linked to the shuttle com system, probably talking to whatever idiot designed this mission. I hoped. We might abort—we’d aborted a landing once before—but even that didn’t look good, not with whatever it was shooting at us all the way back up. The best we could hope for was an alternate designated landing zone—which meant someone had at least looked at it on the upside scanners. The worst—

  “Listen up, marines!” The captain sounded angry, but then he always did before a landing. “We’re landing at alternate Alpha, that’s Alpha, six minutes from now. Sergeants, pop your alt codes.” That meant me, and I thumbed the control that dropped a screen from my helmet and turned on the display. Alternate Alpha was, to put it plainly, a bitch of a site. A short strip, partly overgrown with whatever scraggly green stuff grew on this planet, down in a little valley between hills that looked like the perfect place for the Gerin to have artillery set up. Little colored lines scrawled across the display, pointing out where some jackass in the cruiser thought we ought to assemble, which hill we were supposed to take command of (that’s what it said), and all the details that delight someone playing sandbox war instead of getting his guts shot out for real. I looked twice at the contour lines and values. Ten-meter contours, not five ... those weren’t just little-bitty hills, those were going to give us trouble. Right there where the lines were packed together was just about an eighty-meter cliff, too much for a backpack booster to hop us over. Easy enough for someone on top to toss any old kind of explosive back down.

  And no site preparation. On a stealth assault, there’s minimal site preparation even on the main landing zones—just a fast first-wave ftyover dropping screamers and gas canisters (supposed to make the Gerin itch all over, and not affect us). Alternate strips didn’t get any prep at all. If the Gerin guessed where alternate Alpha was, they’d be meeting us without having to duck from any preparatory fire. That’s what alternate landing sites were like: you take what you get and are grateful it doesn’t mean trailing a chute out a shuttle hatch. That’s the worst. We aren’t really paratroops, and the shuttles sure as hell aren’t paratroop carriers. Although maybe the worst is being blown up in the shuttle, and about then the shuttle lurched again, then bounced violently as something blew entirely too close.

  Then we went down. I suppose it was a controlled landing, sort of, or none of us would have made it. But it felt, with all the pitching and yawing, like we were on our way to a crash. We could hear the tires blow on contact, and then the gear folded, and the shuttle pitched forward one last time to plow along the strip with its heatshield nose. We were all in one tangled pile against the forward bulkhead by then, making almost as much noise as the shuttle itself until the captain bellowed over it. With one final lurch, the craft was motionless, and for an instant, silent.

  “Pop that hatch, Gunny.” The captain’s voice held that tone that no one argues with—no one smart, anyway—and Rolly and I started undogging the main hatch. The men were untangling themselves now, with muttered curses. One of the wetears hadn’t stayed up, and had a broken ankle; he bleated once and then fell silent when he realized no one cared. I yanked on the last locking lever, which had jammed in the crash, just as we heard the first explosions outside. I glanced at the captain. He shrugged. What else could we do? We sure didn’t have a chance in this nicely marked coffin we were in. Rolly put his shoulders into it, and the hatch slid aside to let in a cool, damp breath of local air.

  Later I decided that Caedmon didn’t smell as bad as most planets, but right then all I noticed was the exhaust trails of a couple of Gerin fighters who had left their calling cards on the runway. A lucky wind blew the dust away from us, but the craters were impressive. I looked at the radiation counter on the display—nothing more than background, so it hadn’t been nukes. Now all we had to do was get out before the fighters came back.

  Normally we unload down ramps, four abreast—but with the shuttle sitting on its nose and the port wing, the starboard landing ramp was useless. The portside hatch wouldn’t open at all. This, of course, is why we carry those old-fashioned cargo nets everyone teases us about.

  We had those deployed in seconds (we practice that, in the cruisers’ docking bays, and that’s why the sailorboys laugh at us). Unloading the shuttle—all men and
materiel, including the pilot (who had a broken arm) and the wetear with the bad ankle—went faster than I’d have thought. Our lieutenant, Pascoe, had the forward team, and had already pushed into the scraggly stuff that passed for brush at the base of the nearest hill. At least he seemed to know how to do that. Then Courtney climbed back and placed the charges, wired them up, and came out. When he cleared the red zone, the captain pushed the button. The shuttle went up in a roiling storm of light, and we all blinked. That shuttle wasn’t going anywhere, but even so I felt bad when we blew it ... it was our ticket home. Not to mention the announcement the explosion made. We had to have had survivors to blow it that long after the crash.

  What everyone sees, in the videos of marine landings, is the frontline stuff—the helmeted troops with the best weapons, the bright bars of laser fire—or some asshole reporter’s idea of a human-interest shot (a marine looking pensively at a dead dog, or something). But there’s the practical stuff, which sergeants always have to deal with. Food, for instance. Medical supplies, not to mention the medics, who half the time don’t have the sense to keep their fool heads out of someone’s sights. Water, weapons, ammunition, spare parts comm units, satellite comm bases, spare socks ... whatever we use has to come with us. On a good op, we’re resupplied inside twenty-four hours, but that’s about as common as an honest dockside joint. So the shuttle had supplies for a standard week (navy week: Old Terra standard—it doesn’t matter what the local rotational day or year is), and every damn kilo had to be off-loaded and hauled off. By hand. When the regular ground troops get here, they’ll have floaters and trucks, and their enlisted mess will get fresh veggies and homemade pies ... and that’s another thing that’s gone all the way back, near as I can tell. Marines slog through the mud, hump their stuff uphill and down, eat compressed bricks commonly called—well, you can imagine. And the next folks in, whoever they are, have the choppers and all-terrain vehicles and then make bad jokes about us. But not in the same joint, or not for long.