The ’Puter asked, “Commence auto evasive maneuvers?” Better than me trying to fly the ship.
The first Firewitch rounds flickered up toward me.
I thumbed the “Deploy” toggle before I auto-evaded.
The Scorpion shuddered.
The Silver Bullet munition burst into a swarm of subdividing cluster bombs too small for Slug technology to shoot or chase. Some would drop directly below the deployment point. Others would arc in decaying orbits toward the planet’s surface. In the planet’s stratosphere, each bomb would burst again, into smart bomblets that would rain evenly down on the surface, then count down before they burst, poisoning the only other intelligent species in the known universe.
When the cluster bomb ejected, a bundle of satellites, really just little radio signal relays the size of tennis balls, ejected, too. Up until the bomblets detonated, the abort remote could transmit a signal through them and shut down the whole show. I snatched the abort remote from the console and tucked it in my coverall pocket. “Fat chance!”
Whump.
The first Slug round grazed the Scorpion. On the console, a button the size of a biscuit flashed “Commence auto evasion.”
I pounded the button with my fist, and the Scorpion spiraled down toward the planet, with a half-dozen Fire-witches on its tail. In atmosphere, a Scorpion could out-maneuver portly Firewitches indefinitely.
I said to Jeeb, “We can dodge around the sky until the bomb goes off-”
A purple streak flashed beneath us as a Slug round barely-too barely-missed.
On the overhead display, a new light flashed red. Its label read “Lift impeller slats.”
Great. My tow pilot hadn’t been concerned about dinging this ship’s lift impeller slats, given the needs of the moment. But now, in atmosphere, we could dodge down, but we couldn’t dodge up. We were going to run out of sky.
Six minutes later the Scorpion dodged five hundred feet above a landscape that looked like a neverending green sore, unreeling below us in a blur. Firewitches potshotted us from behind.
The Scorpion juked left, clipped the surface below us, and cartwheeled.
SEVENTY-FIVE
THREE MINUTES LATER, the Scorpion came to rest, listing to the right, its hot skin crackling. Crashing a gravity-shielded ship isn’t physically traumatic; it’s like watching a crash holo from an armchair. But this crash killed the auxiliary systems. The Scorpion’s canopy was as opaque to our surroundings as a coffin lid.
I sighed to Jeeb, “The eagle has landed.” I shrugged back into my armor, drew Ord’s pistol, then triggered the manual canopy release.
Outside, the sky was blue. According to my helmet displays the air was chilly Earth-normal, but too oxygen-poor to breathe for more than two minutes. The Scorpion rested on endless tissue that looked just like the Ganglion blob Howard Hibble and I had captured on Weichsel, about a million years ago. Surrounding us a thousand yards away stood a solid wall of Slugs, without Warrior armor. But some carried mag rifles.
Of course. The Scorpion’s Cavorite impeller kept the Slug Warriors back the way a campfire discouraged wolves. But we sat on the One Big Slug like an unimaginably small flea biting an unimaginably big dog.
I glanced at my helmet display. Distributing a cluster bomb across an entire planet took time. Detonation of the bomblets was hours away.
To my front, a dozen Slugs inched forward. If they came too close, the Cavorite in the impeller would kill them, but Slug Warriors didn’t care. I raised Ord’s pistol, fired, and dropped the lead Slug like a punctured water balloon.
I fingered the two clips in the ammunition pouch on Ord’s holster as the Slugs drew closer. Give or take, at one round per Slug, I was short a minimum of fifty thousand rounds.
Twenty minutes later, kamikaze maggots swarmed the Scorpion, Jeeb, and me three deep while I pounded on them with Ord’s empty pistol.
Nobody really knew what happened to GIs who had been overrun by Slugs over the course of the war. But these didn’t shoot me with their mag rifles, nor stab me with the blades on their rifles’ edges, though they could have.
When poisoned Warriors fell away, others replaced them, until they had dragged me, with Jeeb on my shoulder, squealing and flailing his locomotors at them, out onto their big daddy’s skin. When they were far enough away from the Scorpion that the new Warrior crop could surround me without poisoning themselves, they drew back fifty yards, then just sat there.
Jeeb sat alongside me. My helmet timer ticked down, too slowly. Eleven hours before the bomblets went off. I smiled a little. The bomblets strewn across this planet would kill the Pseudocephalopod. The Slugs couldn’t stop that onrushing train, even if they knew they were stuck on the tracks.
My smile faded. With my ship wrecked, and on the wrong side of a black hole anyway, I would be marooned here on my enemy’s corpse, with Jeeb, my ’Bot Friday, until I starved. But I still wanted to be the last species standing.
“Brrrruuummm!” The rumble knocked me over, and I bounced on the Pseudocephalopod like a kid on a mattress.
“Brrruuu. Mmmm. Uuuummm.”
I stared down alongside me. The vibration was real enough. But the noise was coming from Jeeb’s audio output. A TOT, a Tactical Observation Transport, was designed as a battlefield snoop. In one turkey-sized package, it incorporated sensors not just to see the enemy from above or from ground level, but to hear the enemy. It eavesdropped on communications, decrypted ciphers, translated foreign languages, even ones it didn’t know, then spat out what it processed, like a spaniel retrieving an old print newspaper for its master.
In forty years, no TOT had ever intercepted Slug-to-Slug communication, though Howard’s Spooks had tried.
So the Pseudocephalopod wasn’t talking to its minions that held us at mag-rifle point. It wasn’t talking to itself.
It was talking to me.
SEVENTY-SIX
AS HISTORIC STANDOFFS GO, this didn’t look like much. For the next ten hours I sat, pistol holstered, arms clasped around my armored knees, in the center of a mass of motionless Slug Warriors, which were no more separate from the organism I sat on than white corpuscles.
Meantime, as the timer counted down toward Slug Armageddon, Jeeb’s circuits chittered back and forth with the Pseudocephalopod as Jeeb deciphered the communication he monitored.
Above, the captive Red Moon orbited around the planet’s equator, south of us. The Red Moon had set when syllables began to trickle from Jeeb’s audio, then words. Finally, I heard the Pseudocephalopod, its voice a flat, mechanical simulation.
“Man. You have come to harm me.”
A Slug of few words. After another few hundred thousand exchanges, the translation would be smooth and idiomatic. For the moment, the meaning was plain enough. The Big Slug was on to us, more or less.
“You already harmed us. Many of us.”
“I have not harmed man.”
“There is more than one man. You have not harmed all of man. But you have harmed man.” By the millions. Without remorse.
“I have learned this. Man has many…” Jeeb’s translator stumbled. “Identities.”
The Spooks had always thought that this unitary intelligence couldn’t understand the concept of mankind, or any other kind, as multiple individuals.
The adrenaline of rage surged through me. “My mother. My lover. My friends. Infants. Old people. You harmed them all.” I kicked the vast skin beneath my feet as though the thing could feel it. “Have you learned that I-this identity of man-can kill you now? I’m bringing the rain on you.” The green numbers of my helmet display timer winked down to nine minutes. “And you can’t stop me. Then I’ll beat feet out of here.” The last was bravado. This was a one-way journey for me. But at least it was ending at a worthwhile destination.