“What the hell?”
“What’s that, Charlie?” I didn’t take my eyes off the monitors. Waiting for something to happen.
“The ship, the cruiser — it’s gone.” I looked at the holograph display. He was right; the only red lights were those that stood for the troop carriers.
“Where did it go?” I asked inanely.
“Let’s play it back.” He programmed the display to go back a couple of minutes and cranked out the scale to where both planet and collapsar showed on the cube. The cruiser showed up, and with it, three green dots. Our “coward,” attacking the cruiser with only two drones.
But he had a little help from the laws of physics.
Instead of going into collapsar insertion, he had skimmed around the collapsar field in a slingshot orbit. He had come out going nine-tenths of the speed of light; the drones were going .99c, headed straight for the enemy cruiser. Our planet was about a thousand light-seconds from the collapsar, so the Tauran ship had only ten seconds to detect and stop both drones. And at that speed, it didn’t matter whether you’d been hit by a nova-bomb or a spitball.
The first drone disintegrated the cruiser, and the other one, .01 second behind, glided on down to impact on the planet. The fighter missed the planet by a couple of hundred kilometers and hurtled on into space, decelerating with the maximum twenty-five gees. He’d be back in a couple of months.
But the Taurans weren’t going to wait. They were getting close enough to our lines for both sides to start using lasers, but they were also within easy grenade range. A good-size rock could shield them from laser fire, but the grenades and rockets were slaughtering them.
At first, Brill’s troops had the overwhelming advantage; fighting from ditches, they could only be harmed by an occasional lucky shot or an extremely well-aimed grenade (which the Taurans threw by hand, with a range of several hundred meters). Brill had lost four, but it looked as if the Tauran force was down to less than half its original size.
Eventually, the landscape had been torn up enough so that the bulk of the Tauran force was able to fight from holes in the ground. The fighting slowed down to individual laser duels, punctuated occasionally by heavier weapons. But it wasn’t smart to use up a tachyon rocket against a single Tauran, not with another force of unknown size only a few minutes away.
Something had been bothering me about that holographic replay. Now, with the battle’s lull, I knew what it was.
When that second drone crashed at near-lightspeed, how much damage had it done to the planet? I stepped over to the computer and punched it up; found out how much energy had been released in the collision, and then compared it with geological information in the computer’s memory.
Twenty times as much energy as the most powerful earthquake ever recorded. On a planet three-quarters the size of Earth.
On the general frequency: “Everybody — topside! Right now!” I palmed the button that would cycle and open the airlock and tunnel that led from Administration to the surface.
“What the hell, Will—”
“Earthquake!” How long? “Move!”
Hilleboe and Charlie were right behind me. The cat was sitting on my desk, licking himself unconcernedly I had an irrational impulse to put him inside my suit, which was the way he’d been carried from the ship to the base, but knew he wouldn’t tolerate more than a few minutes of it. Then I had the more reasonable impulse to simply vaporize him with my laser-finger, but by then the door was closed and we were swarming up the ladder. All the way up, and for some time afterward, I was haunted by the image of that helpless animal, trapped under tons of rubble, dying slowly as the air hissed away.
“Safer in the ditches?” Charlie said.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Never been in an earthquake.” Maybe the walls of the ditch would close up and crush us.
I was surprised at how dark it was on the surface. S Doradus had almost set; the monitors had compensated for the low light level.
An enemy laser raked across the clearing to our left, making a quick shower of sparks when it flicked by a gigawatt mounting. We hadn’t been seen yet. We all decided yes, it would be safer in the ditches, and made it to the nearest one in three strides.
There were four men and women in the ditch, one of them badly wounded or dead. We scrambled down the ledge and I turned up my image amplifier to log two, to inspect our ditch mates. We were lucky; one was a grenadier and they also had a rocket launcher. I could just make out the names on their helmets. We were in Brill’s ditch, but she hadn’t noticed us yet. She was at the opposite end, cautiously peering over the edge, directing two squads in a flanking movement. When they were safely in position, she ducked back down. “Is that you, Major?”
“That’s right,” I said cautiously. I wondered whether any of the people in the ditch were among the ones after my scalp.
“What’s this about an earthquake?”
She had been told about the cruiser being destroyed, but not about the other drone. I explained in as few words as possible.
“Nobody’s come out of the airlock,” she said. “Not yet. I guess they all went into the stasis field.”
“Yeah, they were just as close to one as the other.” Maybe some of them were still down below, hadn’t taken my warning seriously. I chinned the general frequency to check, and then all hell broke loose.
The ground dropped away and then flexed back up; slammed us so hard that we were airborne, tumbling out of the ditch. We flew several meters, going high enough to see the pattern of bright orange and yellow ovals, the craters where nova bombs had been stopped. I landed on my feet but the ground was shifting and slithering so much that it was impossible to stay upright.
With a basso grinding I could feel through my suit, the cleared area above our base crumbled and fell in. Part of the stasis field’s underside was exposed when the ground subsided; it settled to its new level with aloof grace.
Well, minus one cat. I hoped everybody else had time and sense enough to get under the dome.
A figure came staggering out of the ditch nearest to me and I realized with a start that it wasn’t human. At that range, my laser burned a hole straight through his helmet; he took two steps and fell over backward. Another helmet peered over the edge of the ditch. I sheared the top of it off before he could raise his weapon.
I couldn’t get my bearings. The only thing that hadn’t changed was the stasis dome, and it looked the same from any angle. The gigawatt lasers were all buried, but one of them had switched on, a brilliant flickering searchlight that illuminated a swirling cloud of vaporized rock.
Obviously, though, I was in enemy territory. I started across the trembling ground toward the dome.
I couldn’t raise any platoon leaders. All of them but Brill were probably inside the dome. I did get Hilleboe and Charlie; told Hilleboe to go inside the dome and roust everybody out. If the next wave also had 128, we were going to need everybody.
The tremors died down and I found my way into a “friendly” ditch — the cooks’ ditch, in fact, since the only people there were Orban and Rudkoski.
“Looks like you’ll have to start from scratch again, Private.”
“That’s all right, sir. Liver needed a rest.”
I got a beep from Hilleboe and chinned her on. “Sir … there were only ten people there. The rest didn’t make it.”
“They stayed behind?” Seemed like they’d had plenty of time.
“I don’t know, sir.”
“Never mind. Get me a count, how many people we have, all totaled.” I tried the platoon leaders’ frequency again and it was still silent.