“What are those things?” Lenna asked quietly. All the information there was to be had on this planet had been downloaded into Bill’s secondary memory storage.
“Ice gophers,” the sentry explained simply, then seemed to shift gears. “Extensive colonies of ice gophers, numbering anywhere from less than a dozen to several hundred, are borrowed into the ice of glaciers and ice fields. The small but hardy pseudo-mammals are intelligent and gregarious, and are noted to be very curious and fearless. The members of the colony are in continual and apparently extensive vocal communication, defending their colonies through the diligence of constant sentries. Their most remarkable trait is their ability to mimic the sound of other animals, even complex speech, with truly amazing clarity.”
“Thus spake Zarathustra,” Lenna said under her breath. “Knowing our friends, they probably have an entire colony of vast proportions surrounding their damned base. Hello!”
“Hello!” several dozen ice gophers obligingly called back.
“Heigh-dee heigh-dee ho!”
“Heigh-dee heigh-dee ho!
“Heigh-dee heigh-dee hay!”
“Heigh-dee heigh-dee hay!”
“By the gods, what a feeling of power!” Lenna said to herself, then started forward again through the middle of the colony. “Take it, maestro!”
“Hey heigh-dee heigh-dee, heigh-dee hay a gopher hole!” Bill roared in a deep, gravelly voice as he followed, his massive hull seeming to sway in time with the rhythm. He was a machine of many unique talents, but music was not one of them.
The first hint Lenna had that they were anywhere near the base was when the small patrol ship came over the top of the hill to their left, moving quickly to intercept them. She recognized the ship immediately as a hover tank, a fairly standard type used by the Union in rugged terrain, part attack craft with powerful weapons and part transport. It could fly like a real aircraft for covering rough ground, although it usually hovered just over the surface on a form of field drive to save power. It could even float, although such a function was of little use in this place.
The tank settled to the ice a short distance away and the main hatch opened, dropping down to form a boarding ramp. Lenna waited patiently while a pair of soldiers in environmental suits like her own stepped out.
“What are you doing out here?” the apparent leader of the pair asked. At least he asked in the calm, almost bored voice of someone who expected a perfectly reasonable answer. After all, Lenna was dressed as one of their own and walking about this disgruntled countryside with a sentry. She relaxed.
“Performing cold-weather exercises on this experimental model,” she explained, indicating Bill. He bent one foreleg and nodded. “We were flying along when something came up behind us in a hurry and blasted us good.”
“Must have been that rebel freighter that made that laughable pass at the base three days ago,” the second of the two offered.
“I imagine so, considering the fact that you’ve been walking due west along its approach,” the first one agreed. “Why don’t we give you a ride in, as much as that might seem like better late than never.”
“How far are we from the base?” Lenna asked as she directed Bill into the rear portion of the tank.
“Oh, it’s just over that next hill, not more than a kilometer away.”
There was certainly something to be said about being delivered to the front door, although she was just as glad that they had not found her before this. As it was, it seemed likely that she would be allowed to simply disappear inside the base as soon as they arrived. Otherwise, after finding her in the middle of the frozen nowhere, there would have been too much time to wonder about her, perhaps even to test her identity to greater depth than her forged idents could endure.
The base was sprawled across the icefield that filled the wide, circular depression of a valley that appeared to be the better part of fifty kilometers across, although only the tops of a few mostly-buried buildings broke through the surface of the snow in widely-scattered clumps. Very little information existed about this base, and no photographs. Lenna was not surprised to find that the largest part of the complex was actually deep underground, in the zone of constant temperatures and therefore sheltered from the deadly cold of the winter storms.
The tank cut a straight path across the ice to the nearest of many long, featureless buildings. The massive metal door opened at their approach, revealing a long, steep ramp descending into the depths. Lenna watched with interest as they descended beneath the relatively thin lens of ice that filled the shallow, valley floor, down within the rock itself. Even the Union knew better than to build something that might be expected to last for centuries in the ice itself, which had a disconcerting habit of moving and cracking, as well as simply accumulating and then disappearing altogether over long periods of time.
They arrived at last in a type of underground garage, where some two dozen hover tanks were parked, with empty stalls for several more. The ceiling seemed a little low, at least to Lenna. She thought that she would have felt just a little nervous in trying to guide a tank through this enclosed space, since the machines had no wheels and were obliged to float about a meter off the ground. There seemed to be about three meters of clearance over the roofs of the parked tanks. Considering how massive they were, that was cutting it just a little close.
Her own tank settled to the floor and the main hatch began to fold down, although the two soldiers remained seated in the forward cabin. The leader turned to look at her.
“This is patrol depot three,” he explained briefly. “We have to go back out on duty, so we’ll just let you out here. The tram station is through that passage on the far side of the chamber.”
“We’re on the eastern perimeter?” Lenna asked, sending Bill on through the narrow hatch.
He nodded. “This is the main complex, of course. Hangars for the supply ships and the mock wolves are on the far side of the western ridge.”
Lenna was so surprised by that unexpected lead that she almost forgot to tender the appropriate thanks and farewells as she followed Bill out the hatch. The tank rose and moved away, accelerating up the long ramp back to the surface. Lenna hardly even noticed as she walked absently across the garage toward the tram station, while Bill followed loyally behind.
Things seemed to be going about as well as she had any right to expect. First she was delivered right inside the base itself, without the need to bluff her way through security, and then she was given the lead she needed to begin her search. Apparently the vague hints were perfectly true. The Union was developing a new form of missile or automated fighter that employed highspeed artificial intelligence to outfly the Starwolves, a highly advanced variant of the old Wolfhound missiles that had been used to limited effect in the past.
“Get a move on,” Bill told her softly. “You might attract attention to yourself, shuffling about like that.”
“All right. You just keep your shell on,” Lenna answered softly. “What’s your problem? You have a short in your patience chip?”
“What do we do now?” he asked, his usual practical and unperturbed self.
“Now we establish our cover,” she said, directing Bill into the first of the two compartments of the tram. “First we turn up the personnel sections and requisition ourselves an apartment where I can leave this arctic gear, and then we begin having a look about. If things continue to… Hello!”