The cat jumped up on my lap, mewling piteously. He’d evidently been unable to tell one person from the other, suited up. But nobody else ever sat at this desk. I reached up to pet him and he jumped away.
The first line that I drew ripped through four sheets of paper. It had been some time since I’d done any delicate work in a suit. I remembered how in training, they’d made us practice controlling the strength-amplification circuits by passing eggs from person to person, messy business. I wondered if they still had eggs on Earth.
The diagram completed, I couldn’t see any way to add to it. All those reams of theory crammed in my brain; there was plenty of tactical advice about envelopment and encirclement, but from the wrong point of view. If you were the one who was being encircled, you didn’t have many options. Sit tight and fight. Respond quickly to enemy concentrations of force, but stay flexible so the enemy can’t employ a diversionary force to divert strength from some predictable section of your perimeter. Make full use of air and space support, always good advice. Keep your head down and your chin up and pray for the cavalry. Hold your position and don’t contemplate Dienbienphu, the Alamo, the Battle of Hastings.
“Eight more carriers out,” Charlie said “Five minutes. Until the first eight get here.”
So they were going to attack in two waves. At least two. What would I do, in the Tauran commander’s position? That wasn’t too farfetched; the Taurans lacked imagination in tactics and tended to copy human patterns.
The first wave could be a throwaway, a kamikaze attack to soften us up and evaluate our defenses. Then the second would come in more methodically, and finish the job. Or vice versa: the first group would have twenty minutes to get entrenched; then the second could skip over their heads and hit us hard at one spot-breach the perimeter and overrun the base.
Or maybe they sent out two forces simply because two was a magic number. Or they could launch only eight troop carriers at a time (that would be bad, implying that the carriers were large; in different situations they had used carriers holding as few as 4 troops or as many as 128).
“Three minutes.” I stared at the cluster of monitors that showed various sectors of the mine field. If we were lucky, they’d land out there, out of caution. Or maybe pass over it low enough to detonate mines.
I was feeling vaguely guilty. I was safe in my hole, doodling, ready to start calling out orders. How did those seventy sacrificial lambs feel about their absentee commander?
Then I remembered how I had felt about Captain Stott that first mission, when he’d elected to stay safely in orbit while we fought on the ground. The rush of remembered hate was so strong I had to bite back nausea.
“Hilleboe, can you handle the lasers by yourself?”
“I don’t see why not, sir.”
I tossed down the pen and stood up. “Charlie, you take over the unit coordination; you can do it as well as I could. I’m going topside.”
“I wouldn’t advise that, sir.”
“Hell no, William. Don’t be an idiot.”
“I’m not taking orders, I’m giv—”
“You wouldn’t last ten seconds up there,” Charlie said.
“I’ll take the same chance as everybody else.”
“Don’t you hear what I’m saying. They’ll kill you!”
“The troops? Nonsense. I know they don’t like me especially, but—”
“You haven’t listened in on the squad frequencies?” No, they didn’t speak my brand of English when they talked among themselves. “They think you put them out on the line for punishment, for cowardice. After you’d told them anyone was free to go into the dome.”
“Didn’t you, sir?” Hilleboe said.
“To punish them? No, of course not.” Not consciously. “They were just up there when I needed … Hasn’t Lieutenant Brill said anything — to them?”
“Not that I’ve heard,” Charlie said. “Maybe she’s been too busy to tune in.”
Or she agreed with them. “I’d better get—”
“There!” Hilleboe shouted. The first enemy ship was visible in one of the mine field monitors; the others appeared in the next second. They came in from random directions and weren’t evenly distributed around the base. Five in the northeast quadrant and only one in the southwest. I relayed the information to Brill.
But we had predicted their logic pretty well; all of them were coming down in the ring of mines. One came close enough to one of the tachyon devices to set it off. The blast caught the rear end of the oddly streamlined craft, causing it to make a complete flip and crash nose-first. Side ports opened up and Taurans came crawling out. Twelve of them; probably four left inside. If all the others had sixteen as well, there were only slightly more of them than of us. In the first wave.
The other seven had landed without incident, and yes, there were sixteen each. Brill shuffled a couple of squads to conform to the enemy’s troop concentration, and she waited.
They moved fast across the mine field, striding in unison like bowlegged, top-heavy robots, not even breaking stride when one of them was blown to bits by a mine, which happened eleven times.
When they came over the horizon, the reason for their apparently random distribution was obvious: they had analyzed beforehand which approaches would give them the most natural cover, from the rubble that the drones had kicked up. They would be able to get within a couple of kilometers of the base before we got any clear line of-sight of them. And their suits had augmentation circuits similar to ours, so they could cover a kilometer in less than a minute.
Brill had her troops open fire immediately, probably more for morale than out of any hope of actually hitting the enemy. They probably were getting a few, though it was hard to tell. At least the tachyon rockets did an impressive job of turning boulders into gravel.
The Taurans returned fire with some weapon similar to the tachyon rocket, maybe exactly the same. They rarely found a mark, though; our people were at and below ground level, and if the rocket didn’t hit something, it would keep going on forever, amen. They did score a hit on one of the gigawatt lasers, though, and the concussion that filtered down to us was strong enough to make me wish we had burrowed a little deeper than twenty meters.
The gigawatts weren’t doing us any good. The Taurans must have figured out the lines of sight ahead of time, and gave them wide berth. That turned out to be fortunate, because it caused Charlie to let his attention wander from the laser monitors for a moment.
“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.