In the few moments I lay awake after finally lying down, the thought came to me that the next time I closed my eyes could well be the last. And partly because of the drug hangover, mostly because of the past day’s horrors, I found that I really didn’t give a shit.
14
Our first contact with the Taurans came during my shift.
The teddy bears were still there when I woke up and replaced Doc Jones on guard. They’d gone back to their original formation, one in front of each guard position. The one who was waiting for me seemed a little larger than normal, but otherwise looked just like all the others. All the grass had been cropped where he was sitting, so he occasionally made forays to the left or right. But he always returned to sit right in front of me, you would say staring if he had had anything to stare with.
We had been facing each other for about fifteen minutes when Cortez’s voice rumbled:
“Awright everybody, wake up and get hid!”
I followed instinct and flopped to the ground and rolled into a tall stand of grass.
“Enemy vessel overhead.” His voice was almost laconic.
Strictly speaking, it wasn’t really overhead, but rather passing somewhat east of us. It was moving slowly, maybe a hundred klicks per hour, and looked like a broomstick surrounded by a dirty soap bubble. The creature riding it was a little more human-looking than the teddy bears, but still no prize. I cranked my image amplifier up to forty log two for a closer look.
He had two arms and two legs, but his waist was so small you could encompass it with both hands. Under the tiny waist was a large horseshoe-shaped pelvic structure nearly a meter wide, from which dangled two long skinny legs with no apparent knee joint. Above that waist his body swelled out again, to a chest no smaller than the huge pelvis. His arms looked surprisingly human, except that they were too long and undermuscled. There were too many fingers on his hands. Shoulderless, neckless. His head was a nightmarish growth that swelled like a goiter from his massive chest. Two eyes that looked like clusters of fish eggs, a bundle of tassels instead of a nose, and a rigidly open hole that might have been a mouth sitting low down where his adam’s apple should have been. Evidently the soap bubble contained an amenable environment, as he was wearing absolutely nothing except his ridged hide, that looked like skin submerged too long in hot water, then dyed a pale orange. “He” had no external genitalia, but nothing that might hint of mammary glands. So we opted for the male pronoun by default.
Obviously, he either didn’t see us or, thought we were part of the herd of teddy bears. He never looked back at us, but just continued in the same direction we were headed, .05 rad east of north.
“Might as well go back to sleep now, if you can sleep after looking at that thing. We move out at 0435.” Forty minutes.
Because of the planet’s opaque cloud cover, there had been no way to tell, from space, what the enemy base looked like or how big it was. We only knew its position, the same way we knew the position the scoutships were supposed to land on. So it too could easily have been underwater, or underground.
But some of the drones were reconnaissance ships as well as decoys: and in their mock attacks on the base, one managed to get close enough to take a picture. Captain Stott beamed down a diagram of the place to Cortez — the only one with a visor in his suit when we were five klicks from the base’s “radio” position. We stopped and he called all the platoon leaders in with the seventh platoon to confer. Two teddy bears loped in, too. We tried to ignore them.
“OK, the captain sent down some pictures of our objective. I’m going to draw a map; you platoon leaders copy.” They took pads and styli out of their leg pockets, while Cortez unrolled a large plastic mat. He gave it a shake to randomize any residual charge, and turned on his stylus.
“Now, we’re coming from this direction.” He put an arrow at the bottom of the sheet. “First thing we’ll hit is this row of huts, probably billets or bunkers, but who the hell knows … Our initial objective is to destroy these buildings — the whole base is on a flat plain; there’s no way we could really sneak by them.”
“Potter here. Why can’t we jump over them?”
“Yeah, we could do that, and wind up completely surrounded, cut to ribbons. We take the buildings.
“After we do that … all I can say is that we’ll have to think on our feet. From the aerial reconnaissance, we can figure out the function of only a couple of buildings — and that stinks. We might wind up wasting a lot of time demolishing the equivalent of an enlisted-men’s bar, ignoring a huge logistic computer because it looks like … a garbage dump or something.”
“Mandella here,” I said. “Isn’t there a spaceport of some kind — seems to me we ought to…”
“I’ll get to that, damn it. There’s a ring of these huts all around the camp, so we’ve got to break through somewhere. This place’ll be closest, less chance of giving away our position before we attack.
“There’s nothing in the whole place that actually looks like a weapon. That doesn’t mean anything, though; you could hide a gigawatt laser in each of those huts.
“Now, about five hundred meters from the huts, in the middle of the base, we’ll come to this big flower-shaped structure.” Cortez drew a large symmetrical shape that looked like the outline of a flower with seven petals. “What the hell this is, your guess is as good as mine. There’s only one of them, though, so we don’t damage it any more than we have to. Which means … we blast it to splinters if I think it’s dangerous.
“Now, as far as your spaceport, Mandella, is concerned — there just isn’t one. Nothing.
“That cruiser the Hope caulked had probably been left in orbit, like ours has to be. If they have any equivalent of a scoutship, or drone missiles, they’re either not kept here or they’re well hidden.”
“Bohrs here. Then what did they attack with, while we were coming down from orbit?”
“I wish we knew, Private.”
“Obviously, we don’t have any way of estimating their numbers, not directly. Recon pictures failed to show a single Tauran on the grounds of the base. Meaning nothing, because it is an alien environment. Indirectly, though … we count the number of broomsticks, those flying things.
“There are fifty-one huts, and each has at most one broomstick. Four don’t have any parked outside, but we located three at various other parts of the base. Maybe this indicates that there are fifty-one Taurans, one of whom was outside the base when the picture was taken.”
“Keating here. Or fifty-one officers.”
“That’s right-maybe fifty thousand infantrymen stacked in one of these buildings. No way to tell. Maybe ten Taurans, each with five broomsticks, to use according to his mood.
“We’ve got one thing in our favor, and that’s communications. They evidently use a frequency modulation of megahertz electromagnetic radiation.”
“Radio!”
“That’s right, whoever you are. Identify yourself when you speak. So it’s quite possible that they can’t detect our phased-neutrino communications. Also, just prior to the attack, the Hope is going to deliver a nice dirty fission bomb; detonate it in the upper atmosphere right over the base. That’ll restrict them to line-of-sight communications for some time; even those will be full of static.”