“Suits,” I agreed. “Uh, I think maybe I’ll take my shirt off.”
“Wouldn’t want to get blood on your shirt.” He relaxed. I started to peel it off and he let go a kick for my kneecap. No wind up. Flat-footed and not tense.
Only my kneecap wasn’t there — I had learned.
A real fight ordinarily can last only a second or two, because that is all the time it takes to kill a man, or knock him out, or disable him to the point where he can’t fight. But we had agreed to avoid inflicting permanent damage; this changes things. We were both young, in top condition, highly trained, and used to absorbing punishment. Ace was bigger, I was maybe a touch faster. Under such conditions the miserable business simply has to go on until one or the other is too beaten down to continue — unless a fluke settles it sooner. But neither one of us was allowing any flukes; we were professionals and wary.
So it did go on, for a long, tedious, painful time. Details would be trivial and pointless; besides, I had no time to take notes.
A long time later I was lying on my back and Ace was flipping water in my face. He looked at me, then hauled me to my feet, shoved me against a bulkhead, steadied me. “Hit me!”
“Huh?” I was dazed and seeing double.
“Johnnie … hit me.”
His face was floating in the air in front of me; I zeroed in on it and slugged it with all the force in my body, hard enough to mash any mosquito in poor health. His eyes closed and he slumped to the deck and I had to grab at a stanchion to keep from following him.
He got slowly up. “Okay, Johnnie,” he said, shaking his head, “I’ve had my lesson. You won’t have any more lip out of me … nor out of anybody in the section. Okay?”
I nodded and my head hurt.
“Shake?” he asked.
We shook on it, and that hurt, too.
Almost anybody else knew more about how the war was going than we did, even though we were in it. This was the period, of course, after the Bugs had located our home planet, through the Skinnies, and had raided it, destroying Buenos Aires and turning “contact troubles” into all-out war, but before we had built up our forces and before the Skinnies had changed sides and become our co-belligerents and de facto allies. Partly effective interdiction for Terra had been set up from Luna (we didn’t know it), but speaking broadly, the Terran Federation was losing the war.
We didn’t know that, either. Nor did we know that strenuous efforts were being made to subvert the alliance against us and bring the Skinnies over to our side; the nearest we came to being told about that was when we got instructions, before the raid in which Flores was killed, to go easy on the Skinnies, destroy as much property as possible but to kill inhabitants only when unavoidable.
What a man doesn’t know he can’t spill if he is captured; neither drugs, nor torture, nor brainwash, nor endless lack of sleep can squeeze out a secret he doesn’t possess. So we were told only what we had to know for tactical purposes. In the past, armies have been known to fold up and quit because the men didn’t know what they were fighting for, or why, and therefore lacked the will to fight. But the M.I. does not have that weakness. Each one of us was a volunteer to begin with, each for some reason or other — some good, some bad. But now we fought because we were M.I. We were professionals, with esprit de corps. We were Rasczak’s Roughnecks, the best unprintable outfit in the whole expurgated M.I.; we climbed into our capsules because Jelly told us it was time to do so and we fought when we got down there because that is what Rasczak’s Roughnecks do.
We certainly didn’t know that we were losing.
Those Bugs lay eggs. They not only lay them, they hold them in reserve, hatch them as needed. If we killed a warrior — or a thousand, or ten thousand — his or their replacements were hatched and on duty almost before we could get back to base. You can imagine, if you like, some Bug supervisor of population flashing a phone to somewhere down inside and saying, “Joe, warm up ten thousand warriors and have ’em ready by Wednesday … and tell engineering to activate reserve incubators N, O, P, Q, and R; the demand is picking up.”
I don’t say they did exactly that, but those were the results. But don’t make the mistake of thinking that they acted purely from instinct, like termites or ants; their actions were as intelligent as ours (stupid races don’t build spaceships!) and were much better co-ordinated. It takes a minimum of a year to train a private to fight and to mesh his fighting in with his mates; a Bug warrior is hatched able to do this.
Every time we killed a thousand Bugs at a cost of one M.I. it was a net victory for the Bugs. We were learning, expensively, just how efficient a total communism can be when used by a people actually adapted to it by evolution; the Bug commissars didn’t care any more about expending soldiers than we cared about expending ammo. Perhaps we could have figured this out about the Bugs by noting the grief the Chinese Hegemony gave the Russo-Anglo-American Alliance; however the trouble with “lessons from history” is that we usually read them best after falling flat on our chins.
But we were learning. Technical instructions and tactical doctrine orders resulted from every brush with them, spread through the Fleet. We learned to tell the workers from the warriors — if you had time, you could tell from the shape of the carapace, but the quick rule of thumb was: If he comes at you, he’s a warrior; if he runs, you can turn your back on him. We learned not to waste ammo even on warriors except in self-protection; instead we went after their lairs. Find a hole, drop down it first a gas bomb which explodes gently a few seconds later, releasing an oily liquid which evaporates as a nerve gas tailored to Bugs (it is harmless to us) and which is heavier than air and keeps on going down — then you use a second grenade of H.E. to seal the hole.
We still didn’t know whether we were getting deep enough to kill the queens — but we did know that the Bugs didn’t like these tactics; our intelligence through the Skinnies and on back into the Bugs themselves was definite on this point. Besides, we cleaned their colony off Sheol completely this way. Maybe they managed to evacuate the queens and the brains … but at least we were learning to hurt them.
But so far as the Roughnecks were concerned, these gas bombings were simply another drill, to be done according to orders, by the numbers, and on the bounce.
Eventually we had to go back to Sanctuary for more capsules. Capsules are expendable (well, so were we) and when they are gone, you must return to base, even if the Cherenkov generators could still take you twice around the Galaxy. Shortly before this a dispatch came through breveting Jelly to lieutenant, vice Rasczak. Jelly tried to keep it quiet but Captain Deladrier published it and then required him to eat forward with the other officers. He still spent all the rest of his time aft.
But we had taken several drops by then with him as platoon leader and the outfit had gotten used to getting along without the Lieutenant — it still hurt but it was routine now. After Jelal was commissioned the word was slowly passed around among us and chewed over that it was time for us to name ourselves for our boss, as with other outfits.
Johnson was senior and took the word to Jelly; he picked me to go along with him as moral support. “Yeah?” growled Jelly.
“Uh, Sarge — I mean Lieutenant, we’ve been thinking—”
“With what?”
“Well, the boys have sort of been talking it over and they think — well, they say the outfit ought to call itself: ‘Jelly’s Jaguars.’”
“They do, eh? How many of ’em favor that name?”