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 deathtrap. 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 nanosecond, 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, zigzagging 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 fine circling around the northeast and northwest quadrants. I’d put the rest of the people on 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 underestimate 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.