“Yes, stop fighting,” Bell Toll said. “It’s not natural to us, so they say.”
There was a moment’s pause, and when Tirdal answered he sounded more distressed and confused than he had since they’d met him.
“Not natural for humans to fight? Your seven million years of evolution has been one long, bloody battle. You had aggressive animals, short supplies, little technology for food and horrible means of communicating. The century before we introduced ourselves alone you exterminated over forty million of your own species. You exterminated over fifteen million of my race in the Dead Years.”
“Oh, so you did know something about us when we met,” Shiva mused, ignoring the other comment. “We always thought so.”
“We’ve never denied it,” Tirdal said.
“No,” Shiva said slowly. “But you never admitted it, either.”
“Anyway,” Bell Toll continued, “Earth and the SSA are trying to, have been trying to, go back to a model a bit like the Indowy. No violence, pretend that technology is just a tool, and concentrate on philosophy. What’s our term — ?”
“Aristotelian,” Shiva supplied.
“Thanks,” the captain said with a smile. “And on the Fringe, we face ferals and potential alien threats like the Tslek.”
“So you’re two distinct cultures in one race?” Tirdal said.
“More than two,” Shiva said. “We have dualities about everything.”
“Interesting,” Tirdal said. They waited for a follow-up comment, but he resumed his reticence.
Bell Toll said, “And that’s why we split off, and why the Michia Mentat were busy producing weapons against the Posleen, and didn’t get involved in the rebellion. A good thing, too, because that would have scared Earth into drastic action, instead of just deciding we were expensive distractions.”
“Which is why we don’t have enough sensats of our own,” Shiva said. “The Mentats are still remote, still concerned with personal development and growing technology, not concerned with the mundane world of carnivores and nukes.”
“I would like them,” Tirdal said.
Everyone else laughed. Tirdal did not.
“So,” Shiva said, “I expect this coming war will be us, possibly the Tular, possibly some Darhel, all against the Tslek, while Earth sits fat and happy and tries to undermine our culture from the rear.”
Gorilla asked, “You think it’s that bad, Captain?”
“I do, Gorilla,” he said. “I can tell by the pricking of my thumbs. Unless something comes along to tip the balance in our favor, the Tslek are going to serve us up like Cram on toast. Oh, to hell with that. How are the Greenwood Grendels doing in deathball?”
Shortly, it was time to move from the scoutship’s personnel bay to the drop pod. The small, spherical craft would have the team in a circle facing inwards, their G couches contoured against the sides, packs and weapons between and underneath them. They were re-stowing gear, ensuring it was secured very tightly for the pending screaming drop through the atmosphere of the target planet. The commander followed them down, shouldering his gear on the way.
Tirdal was closest to him, following everyone else’s lead and fastening his ruck and weapon, a punch gun in his case. Bell Toll glanced at him as he finished and snugged into his drop harness. What else was there about the Darhel that he didn’t know but should? He was really starting to wonder about them. All he or anyone else had to go on was Tirdal’s performance in the Qual course, which was impressive enough. And could they trust him? “We never denied it.” “No, but you never admitted it either.” What other secrets were hiding behind those gold-flecked eyes? But without the sensat they were surely in deep shit.
Everybody else was already in position and starting to strap down as Bell Toll locked his own equipment in place. He checked everyone’s gear as he strode around the ring, all five paces of it, then did another circuit and checked their straps. Nodding to himself, he slumped into his own padding and started buckling in. When done, he plugged a wire into his helmet. “Pilot, we’re secure and ready to drop.”
“Acknowledged. All stations secure,” was the reply. The hatch dropped, clanged and sealed with a hiss. Whatever happened, they were now committed. It was probably psychosomatic, but Bell Toll always felt as if the atmosphere grew stuffier when that hatch sealed. It certainly had its own plastic and chemical smell that one never got used to.
The stealth ship was on a ballistic track mimicking a comet or other piece of deep-space debris. It had a very effective near black-body exterior and the entire system was made to absorb or deflect detection systems. The target planet had one large rotationally locked satellite, like Earth and the Moon, and the plan was to do a hard break in the shadow of the satellite, relative to the planet, then whip past the planet at a lower speed, catching another slingshot to push it back outsystem. If any of the trajectory was detected it would look like a very low probability meteor pass. Immediately after the braking maneuver all systems would shut down and they would become a hole in space. This would leave them in microgravity but everyone had trained in it before. The microgravity portion would last about a day and then they would be inserting through a low-orbit zone of the planet. The main ship would drop the pod and continue on the way while the pod did a small retro burn, then used atmosphere to brake.
There were some dangers. If there were sensors on the “back” side of the satellite they would detect the braking maneuver. Also, if they had been tracked on the way in, the change in trajectory would be obvious. The only way they would know was if one of the ungodly fast Blob missiles headed their way. At a good fraction of the speed of light it wouldn’t take long.
The enemy might shoot the pod down as a precaution. If they weren’t worried about getting detected they would shoot down every meteor that had the potential to be an insertion team. But the Blobs had as good an appreciation of tactical silence as humans. So far the technique had worked all the other times it had been used. So far as they knew, anyway. There were always teams and craft that disappeared without anyone knowing why.
The fall into the system was tedious as nothing else can be. Someone once described combat as “Long periods of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror.” While true, it doesn’t relay the underlying tension of that boredom, hoping for action to stop it while hoping not to have any action. The sheer hell it plays with one’s nerves is indescribable. Any action at this juncture would mean instant, unfathomable death. The boredom was preferable.
The best thing to do was sleep. However, one can only sleep so long, especially in microgravity. Each human figured to nap for about four hours of the duration, leaving close to twenty with almost nothing to do but fret.
Gun Doll listened to dance music, her helmet display providing her a light show. That was all she apparently needed to keep her in a half-aware trance. Ferret and Shiva muttered and shook their heads at each other. Strange chick. Ferret would watch news and movies, switching between the two as he got bored with either fantasy or reality. Shiva would tear through documentary shows from a dozen planets, absorbing history, biology, art and culture at an amazing rate. He retained it all, too. His breadth of knowledge was staggering.
Dagger simply stared at nothing. It was another part of his act or his personality. No one was sure which, and no one wanted to or dared ask. Dagger was as strange as Gun Doll, in his own freakish way. Hell, they were all strange. One couldn’t be a DRT and be normal. The only thing they all shared was a high tolerance for pain and abuse.
Gorilla kept full surround video and audio going. He wanted nothing to do with reality while cooped up in the ball-shaped coffin. Why anyone with his phobias had ever volunteered, no one would ever know. But he handled it every time. Next to him, Thor read books the really old-fashioned way — text on a screen. Historical fiction, fantasy, travel, romance, adventure, geekpunk futurefic and anything else he could get hold of. Bell Toll often felt Thor would be a much broader troop or even qualify as an officer if he’d read some nonfiction now and then. The man had a voracious appetite for words, but everything he read was escapist. Still, if that helped him cope, the captain wouldn’t complain. No matter how removed from reality the man was here, in the field his senses and instincts were good and he could shoot well. He might not fit into a job in the city, but he was just fine in the weeds.