It was exactly 400 days since the day we had begun construction. I was sitting at my desk not checking out Hilleboe’s new duty roster. The cat was on my lap, purring loudly even though I refused to pet it. Charlie was stretched out in a chair reading something on the viewer. The phone buzzed and it was the Commodore.
‘They’re here.’
‘What?’
‘I said they’re here. A Tauran ship just exited the collapsar field. Velocity .80c. Deceleration thirty gees. Give or take.’
Charlie was leaning over my desk. ‘What?’ I dumped the cat.
‘How long? Before you can pursue?’ I asked.
‘Soon as you get off the phone.’ I switched off and went over to the logistic computer, which was a twin to the one on Masaryk II and had a direct data link to it. While I tried to get numbers out of the thing, Charlie fiddled with the visual display.
The display was a hologram about a meter square by half a meter thick and was programmed to show the positions of Sade-138, our planet, and a few other chunks of rock in the system. There were green and red dots to show the positions of our vessels and the Taurans’.
The computer said that the minimum time it could take the Taurans to decelerate and get back to this planet would be a little over eleven days. Of course, that would be straight maximum acceleration and deceleration all the way; we could pick them off like flies on a wall. So, like us, they’d mix up their direction of flight and degree of acceleration in a random way. Based on several hundred past records of enemy behavior, the computer was able to give us a probability table:
Unless, of course, Antopol and her gang of merry pirates managed to make a kill. The chances of that, I had learned in the can, were slightly less than fifty-fifty.
But whether it took 28.9554 days or two weeks, those of us on the ground had to just sit on our hands and watch. If Antopol was successful, then we wouldn’t have to fight until the regular garrison troops replaced us here and we moved on to the next collapsar.
‘Haven’t left yet.’ Charlie had the display cranked down to minimum scale; the planet was a white ball the size of a large melon and Masaryk II was a green dot off to the right some eight melons away; you couldn’t get both on the screen at the same time.
While we were watching, a small green dot popped out of the ship’s dot and drifted away from it. A ghostly number 2 drifted beside it, and a key projected on the display’s lower left-hand corner identified it as 2 — Pursuit Drone. Other numbers in the key identified the Masaryk II, a planetary defense fighter and fourteen planetary defense drones. Those sixteen ships were not yet far enough away from one another to have separate dots.
The cat was rubbing against my ankle; I picked it up and stroked it. ‘Tell Hilleboe to call a general assembly. Might as well break it to everyone at once.’
The men and women didn’t take it very well, and I couldn’t blame them. We had all expected the Taurans to attack much sooner — and when they persisted in not coming, the feeling grew that Strike Force Command had made a mistake and that they’d never show up at all.
I wanted the company to start weapons training in earnest; they hadn’t used any high-powered weapons in almost two years. So I activated their laser-fingers and passed out the grenade and rocket launchers. We couldn’t practice inside the base for fear of damaging the external sensors and defensive laser ring. So we turned off half the circle of gigawatt lasers and went out about a klick beyond the perimeter, one platoon at a time, accompanied by either me or Charlie. Rusk kept a close watch on the early-warning screens. If anything approached, she would send up a flare, and the platoon would have to get back inside the ring before the unknown came over the horizon, at which time the defensive lasers would come on automatically. Besides knocking out the unknown, they would fry the platoon in less than .02 second.
We couldn’t spare anything from the base to use as a target, but that turned out to be no problem. The first tachyon rocket we fired scooped out a hole twenty meters long by ten wide by five deep; the rubble gave us a multitude of targets from twice-man-sized on down.
The soldiers were good, a lot better than they had been with the primitive weapons in the stasis field. The best laser practice turned out to be rather like skeetshooting: pair up the people and have one stand behind the other, throwing rocks at random intervals. The one who was shooting had to gauge the rock’s trajectory and zap it before it hit the ground. Their eye-hand coordination was impressive (maybe the Eugenics Council had done something right). Shooting at rocks down to pebble-size, most of them could do better than nine out of ten. Old non-bioengineered me could hit maybe seven out of ten, and I’d had a good deal more practice than they had.
They were equally facile at estimating trajectories with the grenade launcher, which was a more versatile weapon than it had been in the past. Instead of shooting one-microton bombs with a standard propulsive charge, it had four different charges and a choice of one-, two-, three- or four-microton bombs. And for really close in-fighting, where it was dangerous to use the lasers, the barrel of the launcher would unsnap, and you could load it with a magazine of ‘shotgun’ rounds. Each shot would send out an expanding cloud of a thousand tiny flechettes that were instant death out to five meters and turned to harmless vapor at six.
The tachyon rocket launcher required no skill whatsoever. All you had to do was to be careful no one was standing behind you when you fired it; the backwash from the rocket was dangerous for several meters behind the launching tube. Otherwise, you just lined your target up in the crosshairs and pushed the button. You didn’t have to worry about trajectory; the rocket traveled in a straight line for all practical purposes. It reached escape velocity in less than a second.
It improved the troops’ morale to get out and chew up the landscape with their new toys. But the landscape wasn’t fighting back. No matter how physically impressive the weapons were, their effectiveness would depend on what the Taurans could throw back. A Greek phalanx must have looked pretty impressive, but it wouldn’t do too well against a single man with a flamethrower.
And as with any engagement, because of time dilation, there was no way to tell what sort of weaponry they would have. They might have never heard of the stasis field. Or they might be able to say a magic word and make us disappear.
I was out with the fourth platoon, burning rocks, when Charlie called and asked me to come back in, urgent. I left Heimoff in charge.
‘Another one?’ The scale of the holograph display was such that our planet was pea-sized, about five centimeters from the X that marked the position of Sade-138. There were forty-one red and green dots scattered around the field; the key identified number 41 as Tauran Cruiser (2).
‘You called Antopol?’
‘Yeah.’ He anticipated the next question. ‘It’ll take almost a day for the signal to get there and back.’
‘It’s never happened before,’ but of course Charlie knew that.
‘Maybe this collapsar is especially important to them.’
‘Likely.’ So it was almost certain we’d be fighting on the ground. Even if Antopol managed to get the first cruiser, she wouldn’t have a fifty-fifty chance on the second one. Low on drones and fighters. ‘I wouldn’t like to be Antopol now.’
‘She’ll just get it earlier.’
‘I don’t know. We’re in pretty good shape.’
‘Save it for the troops, William.’ He turned down the display’s scale to where it showed only two objects: Sade-138 and the new red dot, slowing moving.
We spent the next two weeks watching dots blink out. And if you knew when and where to look, you could go outside and see the real thing happening, a hard bright speck of white light that faded in about a second.
In that second, a nova bomb had put out over a million times the power of a gigawatt laser. It made a miniature star half a klick in diameter and as hot as the interior of the sun. Anything it touched it would consume. The radiation from a near miss could botch up a ship’s electronics beyond repair — two fighters, one of ours and one of theirs, had evidently suffered that fate, silently drifting out of the system at a constant velocity, without power.
We had used more powerful nova bombs earlier in the war, but the degenerate matter used to fuel them was unstable in large quantities. The bombs had a tendency to explode while they were still inside the ship. Evidently the Taurans had the same problem — or they had copied the process from us in the first place — because they had also scaled down to nova bombs that used less than a hundred kilograms of degenerate matter. And they deployed them much the same way we did, the warhead separating into dozens of pieces as it approached the target, only one of which was the nova bomb.
They would probably have a few bombs left over after they finished off Masaryk II and her retinue of fighters and drones. So it was likely that we were wasting time and energy in weapons practice.
The thought did slip by my conscience that I could gather up eleven people and board the fighter we had hidden safe behind the stasis field. It was pre-programmed to take us back to Stargate.
I even went to the extreme of making a mental list of the eleven, trying to think of eleven people who meant more to me than the rest. Turned out I’d be picking six at random.
I put the thought away, though. We did have a chance, maybe a damned good one, even against a fully-armed cruiser. It wouldn’t be easy to get a nova bomb close enough to include us inside its kill-radius.
Besides, they’d space me for desertion. So why bother?
Spirits rose when one of Antopol’s drones knocked out the first Tauran cruiser. Not counting the ships left behind for planetary defense, she still had eighteen drones and two fighters. They wheeled around to intercept the second cruiser, by then a few light hours away, still being harassed by fifteen enemy drones.
One of the Tauran drones got her. Her ancillary crafts continued the attack, but it was a rout. One fighter and three drones fled the battle at maximum acceleration, looping up over the plane of the ecliptic, and were not pursued. We watched them with morbid interest while the enemy cruiser inched back to do battle with us. The fighter was headed back for Sade-138, to escape. Nobody blamed them. In fact, we sent them a farewell/good luck message; they didn’t respond, naturally, being zipped up in the tanks. But it would be recorded.
It took the enemy five days to get back to the planet and be comfortably ensconced in a stationary orbit on the other side. We settled in for the inevitable first phase of the attack, which would be aerial and totally automated: their drones against our lasers. I put a force of fifty men and women inside the stasis field, in case one of the drones got through. An empty gesture, really; the enemy could just stand by and wait for them to turn off the field, fry them the second it flickered out.
Charlie had a weird idea that I almost went for.
‘We could boobytrap the place.’
‘What do you mean?’ I said. ‘This place is booby-trapped, out to twenty-five klicks.’
‘No, not the mines and such. I mean the base itself, here, underground.’
‘Go on.’
‘There are two nova bombs in that fighter.’ He pointed at the stasis field through a couple of hundred meters of rock. ‘We can roll them down here, boobytrap them, then hide everybody in the stasis field and wait.’
In a way it was tempting. It would relieve me from any responsibility for decision-making, leave everything up to chance. ‘I don’t think it would work, Charlie.’
He seemed hurt. ‘Sure it would.’
‘No, look. For it to work, you have to get every single Tauran inside the kill-radius before it goes off — but they wouldn’t all come charging in here once they breached our defenses. Least of all if the place seemed deserted. They’d suspect something, send in an advance party. And after the advance party set off the bombs—’
‘We’d be back where we started, yeah. Minus the base. Sorry.’
I shrugged. ‘It was an idea. Keep thinking, Charlie.’ I turned my attention back to the display, where the lopsided space war was in progress. Logically enough, the enemy wanted to knock out that one fighter overhead before he started to work on us. About all we could do was watch the red dots crawl around the planet and try to score. So far the pilot had managed to knock out all the drones; the enemy hadn’t sent any fighters after him yet.
I’d given the pilot control over five of the lasers in our defensive ring. They couldn’t do much good, though. A gigawatt laser pumps out a billion kilowatts per second at a range of a hundred meters. A thousand klicks up, though, the beam was attenuated to ten kilowatts. Might do some damage if it hit an optical sensor. At least confuse things.
‘We could use another fighter. Or six.’
‘Use up the drones,’ I said. We did have a fighter, of course, and a swabbie attached to us who could pilot it. It might turn out to be our only hope, if they got us cornered in the stasis field.
‘How far away is the other guy?’ Charlie asked, meaning the fighter pilot who had turned tail. I cranked down the scale, and the green dot appeared at the right of the display. ‘About six light hours.’ He had two drones left, too near to him to show as separate dots, having expended one in covering his getaway. ‘He’s not accelerating any more, but he’s doing point nine gee.’
‘Couldn’t do us any good if he wanted to.’ Need almost a month to slow down.
At that low point, the light that stood for our own defensive fighter faded out. ‘Shit.’
‘Now the fun starts. Should I tell the troops to get ready, stand by to go topside?’
‘No … have them suit up, in case we lose air. But I expect it’ll be a little while before we have a ground attack.’ I turned the scale up again. Four red dots were already creeping around the globe toward us.
I got suited up and came back to Administration to watch the fireworks on the monitors.
The lasers worked perfectly. All four drones converged on us simultaneously; were targeted and destroyed. All but one of the nova bombs went off below our horizon (the visual horizon was about ten kilometers away, but the lasers were mounted high and could target something at twice that distance). The bomb that detonated on our horizon had melted out a semicircular chunk that glowed brilliantly white for several minutes. An hour later, it was still glowing dull orange, and the ground temperature outside had risen to fifty degrees Absolute, melting most of our snow, exposing an irregular dark gray surface.
The next attack was also over in a fraction of a second, but this time there had been eight drones, and four of them got within ten klicks. Radiation from the glowing craters raised the temperature to nearly 300 degrees. That was above the melting point of water, and I was starting to get worried. The fighting suits were good to over a thousand degrees, but the automatic lasers depended on low-temperature superconductors for their speed.
I asked the computer what the lasers’ temperature limit was, and it printed out TR 398-734-009-265, ‘Some Aspects Concerning the Adaptability of Cryogenic Ordnance to Use in Relatively High-Temperature Environments,’ which had lots of handy advice about how we could insulate the weapons if we had access to a fully-equipped armorer’s shop. It did note that the response time of automatic-aiming devices increased as the temperature increased, and that above some ‘critical temperature,’ the weapons would not aim at all. But there was no way to predict any individual weapon’s behavior, other than to note that the highest critical temperature recorded was 790 degrees and the lowest was 420 degrees.
Charlie was watching the display. His voice was flat over the suit’s radio. ‘Sixteen this time.’
‘Surprised?’ One of the few things we knew about Tauran psychology was a certain compulsiveness about numbers, especially primes and powers of two.
‘Let’s just hope they don’t have 32 left.’ I queried the computer on this; all it could say was that the cruiser had thus far launched a total of 44 drones and that some cruisers had been known to carry as many as 128.
We had more than a half-hour before the drones would strike. I could evacuate everybody to the stasis field, and they would be temporarily safe if one of the nova bombs got through. Safe, but trapped. How long would it take the crater to cool down, if three or four — let alone sixteen — of the bombs made it through? You couldn’t live forever in a fighting suit, even though it recycled everything with remorseless efficiency. One week was enough to make you thoroughly miserable. Two weeks, suicidal. Nobody had ever gone three weeks, under field conditions.
Besides, as a defensive position, the stasis field could be a death-trap. The enemy has all the options since the dome is opaque; the only way you can find out what they’re up to is to stick your head out. They didn’t have to wade in with primitive weapons unless they were impatient. They could keep the dome saturated with laser fire and wait for you to turn off the generator. Meanwhile harassing you by throwing spears, rocks, arrows into the dome — you could return fire, but it was pretty futile.
Of course, if one man stayed inside the base, the others could wait out the next half-hour in the stasis field. If he didn’t come get them, they’d know the outside was hot. I chinned the combination that would give me a frequency available to everybody echelon 5 and above.
‘This is Major Mandella.’ That still sounded like a bad joke.
I outlined the situation to them and asked them to tell their troops that everyone in the company was free to move into the stasis field. I would stay behind and come retrieve them if things went well — not out of nobility, of course; I preferred taking the chance of being vaporized in a nano-second, rather than almost certain slow death under the gray dome.
I chinned Charlie’s frequency. ‘You can go, too. I’ll take care of things here.’
‘No, thanks,’ he said slowly. ‘I’d just as soon … Hey, look at this.’
The cruiser had launched another red dot, a couple of minutes behind the others. The display’s key identified it as being another drone. ‘That’s curious.’
‘Superstitious bastards,’ he said without feeling.
It turned out that only eleven people chose to join the fifty who had been ordered into the dome. That shouldn’t have surprised me, but it did.
As the drones approached, Charlie and I stared at the monitors, carefully not looking at the holograph display, tacitly agreeing that it would be better not to know when they were one minute away, thirty seconds … And then, like the other times, it was over before we knew it had started. The screens glared white and there was a yowl of static, and we were still alive.
But this time there were fifteen new holes on the horizon — or closer! — and the temperature was rising so fast that the last digit in the readout was an amorphous blur. The number peaked in the high 800s and began to slide back down.
We had never seen any of the drones, not during that tiny fraction of a second it took the lasers to aim and fire. But then the seventeenth one flashed over the horizon, zig-zagging crazily, and stopped directly overhead. For an instant it seemed to hover, and then it began to fall. Half the lasers had detected it, and they were firing steadily, but none of them could aim; they were all stuck in their last firing position.
It glittered as it dropped, the mirror polish of its sleek hull reflecting the white glow from the craters and the eerie flickering of the constant, impotent laser fire. I heard Charlie take one deep breath, and the drone fell so close you could see spidery Tauran numerals etched on the hull and a transparent porthole near the tip — then its engine flared and it was suddenly gone.
‘What the hell?’ Charlie said, quietly.
The porthole. ‘Maybe reconnaissance.’
‘I guess. So we can’t touch them, and they know it.’
‘Unless the lasers recover.’ Didn’t seem likely. ‘We better get everybody under the dome. Us, too.’
He said a word whose vowel had changed over the centuries, but whose meaning was clear. ‘No hurry. Let’s see what they do.’
We waited for several hours. The temperature outside stabilized at 690 degrees — just under the melting point of zinc, I remembered to no purpose — and I tried the manual controls for the lasers, but they were still frozen.
‘Here they come,’ Charlie said. ‘Eight again.’
I started for the display. ‘Guess we’ll—’
‘Wait! They aren’t drones.’ The key identified all eight with the legend Troop Carrier.
‘Guess they want to take the base,’ he said. ‘Intact.’
That, and maybe try out new weapons and techniques. ‘It’s not much of a risk for them. They can always retreat and drop a nova bomb in our laps.’
I called Brill and had her go get everybody who was in the stasis field, set them up with the remainder of her platoon as a defensive line circling around the northeast and northwest quadrants. I’d put the rest of the people in the other half-circle.
‘I wonder,’ Charlie said. ‘Maybe we shouldn’t put everyone topside at once. Until we know how many Taurans there are.’
That was a point. Keep a reserve, let the enemy under-estimate our strength. ‘It’s an idea … There might be just 64 of them in eight carriers.’ Or 128 or 256. I wished our spy satellites had a finer sense of discrimination. But you can only cram so much into a machine the size of a grape.
I decided to let Brill’s seventy people be our first line of defense and ordered them into a ring in the ditches we had made outside the base’s perimeter. Everybody else would stay downstairs until needed.
If it turned out that the Taurans, either through numbers or new technology, could field an unstoppable force, I’d order everyone into the stasis field. There was a tunnel from the living quarters to the dome, so the people underground could go straight there in safety. The ones in the ditches would have to fall back under fire. If any of them were still alive when I gave the order.
I called in Hilleboe and had her and Charlie keep watch over the lasers. If they came unstuck, I’d call Brill and her people back. Turn on the automatic aiming system again, then sit back and watch the show. But even stuck, the lasers could be useful. Charlie marked the monitors to show where the rays would go; he and Hilleboe could fire them manually whenever something moved into a weapon’s line-of-sight.
We had about twenty minutes. Brill was walking around the perimeter with her men and women, ordering them into the ditches a squad at a time, setting up overlapping fields of fire. I broke in and asked her to set up the heavy weapons so that they could be used to channel the enemy’s advance into the path of the lasers.
There wasn’t much else to do but wait. I asked Charlie to measure the enemy’s progress and try to give us an accurate count-down, then sat at my desk and pulled out a pad, to diagram Brill’s arrangement and see whether I could improve on it.
The cat jumped up on my lap, mewling piteously. He’d evidently been unable to tell one person from the other, suited up. But nobody else ever sat at this desk. I reached up to pet him and he jumped away.
The first line that I drew ripped through four sheets of paper. It had been some time since I’d done any delicate work in a suit. I remembered how in training, they’d made us practice controlling the strength-amplification circuits by passing eggs from person to person, messy business. I wondered if they still had eggs on Earth.
The diagram completed, I couldn’t see any way to add to it. All those reams of theory crammed in my brain; there was plenty of tactical advice about envelopment and encirclement, but from the wrong point of view. If you were the one who was being encircled, you didn’t have many options. Sit tight and fight. Respond quickly to enemy concentrations of force, but stay flexible so the enemy can’t employ a diversionary force to divert strength from some predictable section of your perimeter. Make full use of air and space support, always good advice. Keep your head down and your chin up and pray for the cavalry. Hold your position and don’t contemplate Dienbienphu, the Alamo, the Battle of Hastings.
‘Eight more carriers out,’ Charlie said. ‘Five minutes. Until the first eight get here.’
So they were going to attack in two waves. At least two. What would I do, in the Tauran commander’s position? That wasn’t too far-fetched; the Taurans lacked imagination in tactics and tended to copy human patterns.
The first wave could be a throwaway, a kamikaze attack to soften us up and evaluate our defenses. Then the second would come in more methodically, and finish the job. Or vice versa: the first group would have twenty minutes to get entrenched; then the second could skip over their heads and hit us hard at one spot — breach the perimeter and over-run the base.
Or maybe they sent out two forces simply because two was a magic number. Or they could launch only eight troop carriers at a time (that would be bad, implying that the carriers were large; in different situations they had used carriers holding as few as 4 troops or as many as 128).
‘Three minutes.’ I stared at the cluster of monitors that showed various sectors of the mine field. If we were lucky, they’d land out there, out of caution. Or maybe pass over it low enough to detonate mines.
I was feeling vaguely guilty. I was safe in my hole, doodling, ready to start calling out orders. How did those seventy sacrificial lambs feel about their absentee commander?
Then I remembered how I had felt about Captain Stott that first mission, when he’d elected to stay safely in orbit while we fought on the ground. The rush of remembered hate was so strong I had to bite back nausea.
‘Hilleboe, can you handle the lasers by yourself?’
‘I don’t see why not, sir.’
I tossed down the pen and stood up. ‘Charlie, you take over the unit coordination; you can do it as well as I could. I’m going topside.’
‘I wouldn’t advise that, sir.’
‘Hell no, William. Don’t be an idiot.’
‘I’m not taking orders, I’m giv—’
‘You wouldn’t last ten seconds up there,’ Charlie said.
‘I’ll take the same chance as everybody else.’
‘Don’t you hear what I’m saying. They’ll kill you!’
‘The troops? Nonsense. I know they don’t like me especially, but—’
‘You haven’t listened in on the squad frequencies?’ No, they didn’t speak my brand of English when they talked among themselves. ‘They think you put them out on the line for punishment, for cowardice. After you’d told them anyone was free to go into the dome.’
‘Didn’t you, sir?’ Hilleboe said.
‘To punish them? No, of course not.’ Not consciously. ‘They were just up there when I needed … Hasn’t Lieutenant Brill said anything to them?’
‘Not that I’ve heard,’ Charlie said. ‘Maybe she’s been too busy to tune in.’
Or she agreed with them. ‘I’d better get—’
‘There!’ Hilleboe shouted. The first empty ship was visible in one of the mine field monitors; the others appeared in the next second. They came in from random directions and weren’t evenly distributed around the base. Five in the northeast quadrant and only one in the south-west. I relayed the information to Brill.
But we had predicted their logic pretty well; all of them were coming down in the ring of mines. One came close enough to one of the tachyon devices to set it off. The blast caught the rear end of the oddly streamlined craft, causing it to make a complete flip and crash nose-first. Side ports opened up and Taurans came crawling out. Twelve of them; probably four left inside. If all the others had sixteen as well, there were only slightly more of them than of us.
In the first wave.
The other seven had landed without incident, and yes; there were sixteen each. Brill shuffled a couple of squads to conform to the enemy’s troop concentration, and she waited.
They moved fast across the mine field, striding in unison like bowlegged, top-heavy robots, not even breaking stride when one of them was blown to bits by a mine, which happened eleven times.
When they came over the horizon, the reason for their apparently random distribution was obvious: they had analyzed beforehand which approaches would give them the most natural cover, from the rubble that the drones had kicked up. They would be able to get within a couple of kilometers of the base before we got any clear line-of-sight of them. And their suits had augmentation circuits similar to ours, so they could cover a kilometer in less than a minute.
Brill had her troops open fire immediately, probably more for morale than out of any hope of actually hitting the enemy. They probably were getting a few, though it was hard to tell. At least the tachyon rockets did an impressive job of turning boulders into gravel.
The Taurans returned fire with some weapon similar to the tachyon rocket, maybe exactly the same. They rarely found a mark, though; our people were at and below ground level, and if the rocket didn’t hit something, it would keep going on forever, amen. They did score a hit on one of the gigawatt lasers, though, and the concussion that filtered down to us was strong enough to make me wish we had burrowed a little deeper than twenty meters.
The gigawatts weren’t doing us any good. The Taurans must have figured out the lines of sight ahead of time, and gave them wide berth. That turned out to be fortunate, because it caused Charlie to let his attention wander from the laser monitors for a moment.
‘What the hell?’
‘What’s that, Charlie?’ I didn’t take my eyes off the monitors. Waiting for something to happen.
‘The ship, the cruiser — it’s gone.’ I looked at the holograph display. He was right; the only red lights were those that stood for the troop carriers.
‘Where did it go?’ I asked inanely.
‘Let’s play it back.’ He programmed the display to go back a couple of minutes and cranked out the scale to where both planet and collapsar showed on the cube. The cruiser showed up, and with it, three green dots. Our ‘coward,’ attacking the cruiser with only two drones.
But he had a little help from the laws of physics.
Instead of going into collapsar insertion, he had skimmed around the collapsar field in a slingshot orbit. He had come out going nine-tenths of the speed of light; the drones were going .99c, headed straight for the enemy cruiser. Our planet was about a thousand light seconds from the collapsar, so the Tauran ship had only ten seconds to detect and stop both drones. And at that speed, it didn’t matter whether you’d been hit by a nova-bomb or a spitball.
The first drone disintegrated the cruiser, and the other one, .01 second behind, glided on down to impact on the planet. The fighter missed the planet by a couple of hundred kilometers and hurtled on into space, decelerating with the maximum twenty-five gees. He’d be back in a couple of months.
But the Taurans weren’t going to wait. They were getting close enough to our lines for both sides to start using lasers, but they were also within easy grenade range. A good-size rock could shield them from laser fire, but the grenades and rockets were slaughtering them.
At first, Brill’s troops had the overwhelming advantage; fighting from ditches, they could only be harmed by an occasional lucky shot or an extremely well-aimed grenade (which the Taurans threw by hand, with a range of several hundred meters). Brill had lost four, but it looked as if the Tauran force was down to less than half its original size.
Eventually, the landscape had been torn up enough so that the bulk of the Tauran force was able to fight from holes in the ground. The fighting slowed down to individual laser duels, punctuated occasionally by heavier weapons. But it wasn’t smart to use up a tachyon rocket against a single Tauran, not with another force of unknown size only a few minutes away.
Something had been bothering me about that holographic replay. Now, with the battle’s lull, I knew what it was.
When that second drone crashed at near-lightspeed, how much damage had it done to the planet? I stepped over to the computer and punched it up; found out how much energy had been released in the collision, and then compared it with geological information in the computer’s memory.
Twenty times as much energy as the most powerful earthquake ever recorded. On a planet three-quarters the size of Earth.
On the general frequency: ‘Everybody-topside! Right now!’ I palmed the button that would cycle and open the airlock and tunnel that led from Administration to the surface.
‘What the hell, Will—’
‘Earthquake!’ How long? ‘Move!’
Hilleboe and Charlie were right behind me. The cat was sitting on my desk, licking himself unconcernedly. I had an irrational impulse to put him inside my suit, which was the way he’d been carried from the ship to the base, but knew he wouldn’t tolerate more than a few minutes of it. Then I had the more reasonable impulse to simply vaporize him with my laser-finger, but by then the door was closed and we were swarming up the ladder. All the way up, and for some time afterward, I was haunted by the image of that helpless animal, trapped under tons of rubble, dying slowly as the air hissed away.
‘Safer in the ditches?’ Charlie said.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Never been in an earthquake.’ Maybe the walls of the ditch would close up and crush us.
I was surprised at how dark it was on the surface. S Doradus had almost set; the monitors had compensated for the low light level.
An enemy laser raked across the clearing to our left, making a quick shower of sparks when it flicked by a gigawatt mounting. We hadn’t been seen yet. We all decided yes, it would be safer in the ditches, and made it to the nearest one in three strides.
There were four men and women in the ditch, one of them badly wounded or dead. We scrambled down the ledge and I turned up my image amplifier to log two, to inspect our ditchmates. We were lucky; one was a grenadier and they also had a rocket launcher. I could just make out the names on their helmets. We were in Brill’s ditch, but she hadn’t noticed us yet. She was at the opposite end, cautiously peering over the edge, directing two squads in a flanking movement. When they were safely in position, she ducked back down. ‘Is that you, Major?’
‘That’s right,’ I said cautiously. I wondered whether any of the people in the ditch were among the ones after my scalp.
‘What’s this about an earthquake?’
She had been told about the cruiser being destroyed, but not about the other drone. I explained in as few words as possible.
‘Nobody’s come out of the airlock,’ she said. ‘Not yet. I guess they all went into the stasis field.’
‘Yeah, they were just as close to one as the other.’ Maybe some of them were still down below, hadn’t taken my warning seriously. I chinned the general frequency to check, and then all hell broke loose.
The ground dropped away and then flexed back up; slammed us so hard that we were airborne, tumbling out of the ditch. We flew several meters, going high enough to see the pattern of bright orange and yellow ovals, the craters where nova bombs had been stopped. I landed on my feet but the ground was shifting and slithering so much that it was impossible to stay upright.
With a basso grinding I could feel through my suit, the cleared area above our base crumbled and fell in. Part of the stasis field’s underside was exposed when the ground subsided; it settled to its new level with aloof grace.
Well, minus one cat. I hoped everybody else had time and sense enough to get under the dome.
A figure came staggering out of the ditch nearest to me and I realized with a start that it wasn’t human. At that range, my laser burned a hole straight through his helmet; he took two steps and fell over backward. Another helmet peered over the edge of the ditch. I sheared the top of it off before he could raise his weapon.
I couldn’t get my bearings. The only thing that hadn’t changed was the stasis dome, and it looked the same from any angle. The gigawatt lasers were all buried, but one of them had switched on, a brilliant flickering searchlight that illuminated a swirling cloud of vaporized rock.
Obviously, though, I was in enemy territory. I started across the trembling ground toward the dome.
I couldn’t raise any platoon leaders. All of them but Brill were probably inside the dome. I did get Hilleboe and Charlie; told Hilleboe to go inside the dome and roust everybody out. If the next wave also had 128, we were going to need everybody.
The tremors died down and I found my way into a ‘friendly’ ditch — the cooks’ ditch, in fact, since the only people there were Orban and Rudkoski.
‘Looks like you’ll have to start from scratch again, Private.’
‘That’s all right, sir. Liver needed a rest.’
I got a beep from Hilleboe and chinned her on. ‘Sir … there were only ten people there. The rest didn’t make it.’
‘They stayed behind?’ Seemed like they’d had plenty of time.
‘I don’t know, sir.’
‘Never mind. Get me a count, how many people we have, all totalled.’ I tried the platoon leaders’ frequency again and it was still silent.
The three of us watched for enemy laser fire for a couple of minutes, but there was none. Probably waiting for reinforcements.
Hilleboe called back. ‘I only get fifty-three, sir. Some may be unconscious.’
‘All right. Have them sit tight until—’ Then the second wave showed up, the troop carriers roaring over the horizon with their jets pointed our way, decelerating. ‘Get some rockets on those bastards!’ Hilleboe yelled to everyone in particular. But nobody had managed to stay attached to a rocket launcher while he was being tossed around. No grenade launchers, either, and the range was too far for the hand lasers to do any damage.
These carriers were four or five times the size of the ones in the first wave. One of them grounded about a kilometer in front of us, barely stopping long enough to disgorge its troops. Of which there were over 50, probably 64 — times 8 made 512. No way we could hold them back.
‘Everybody listen, this is Major Mandella.’ I tried to keep my voice even and quiet. ‘We’re going to retreat back into the dome, quickly but in an orderly way. I know we’re scattered all over hell. If you belong to the second or fourth platoon, stay put for a minute and give covering fire while the first and third platoons, and support, fall back.
‘First and third and support, fall back to about half your present distance from the dome, then take cover and defend the second and fourth as they come back. They’ll go to the edge of the dome and cover you while you come back the rest of the way.’ I shouldn’t have said ‘retreat’; that word wasn’t in the book. Retrograde action.
There was a lot more retrograde than action. Eight or nine people were firing, and all the rest were in full flight. Rudkoski and Orban had vanished. I took a few carefully aimed shots, to no great effect, then ran down to the other end of the ditch, climbed out and headed for the dome.
The Taurans started firing rockets, but most of them seemed to be going too high. I saw two of us get blown away before I got to my halfway point; found a nice big rock and hid behind it. I peeked out and decided that only two or three of the Taurans were close enough to be even remotely possible laser targets, and the better part of valor would be in not drawing unnecessary attention to myself. I ran the rest of the way to the edge of the field and stopped to return fire. After a couple of shots, I realized that I was just making myself a target; as far as I could see there was only one other person who was still running toward the dome.
A rocket zipped by, so close I could have touched it. I flexed my knees and kicked, and entered the dome in a rather undignified posture.