Aircraft that had landed for final checks of the site flew away like autumn leaves. The cruiser hung until they were gone, extending her landing jacks, which were massive as cathedral buttresses. Then slowly she sank down upon them. For moments the engines loudened, ringing through her metal corridors. Words flew, quiet and tense: “—stability achieved… air cover complete… weapons crew standing by… detectors report negative… standing by… standing by… standing by…”
“Proceed with Phase Two,” Chang ordered.
“Now hear this,” Hunyadi chanted to the all-points intercom. The engines growled into silence. The airlocks opened. Inhuman in helmets, body armor, flying harness, the weapons they clutched, the marine squadrons rushed forth. First they would seize the guerrilla arsenals, and next cast about for human spoor.
The bridge had not really fallen still. Data continued to flow in, commands to flow out; but by comparison, sound was now a mutter, eerie as the bodies of fog that moved out of undertree shadows and across the bouldery hillside. Hunyadi looked into the screens and grimace “Sir,” he said uneasily, if the enemy’s as skilled in moving about through the woods as I’Ve heard, someone could come near enough to fire a small nuclear missile at us.”
“Have no worries on that score, Citizen Hunyadi,” Chang said. “Nothing material, launched from a projector that one or two men might carry, could reach us before it was detected and intercepted. A blaster beam might scorch a hull plate or two. But upper and lower gun turrets would instantly triangulate on the source.” His tone was indulgent; like most Navy men serving on capital ships, Hunyadi was quite new to ground operations. “Frankly, I could hope for a show of resistance. The alternative is a long, tedious airborne bushbeating.”
Hunyadi winced. “Hunting men like animals. I don’t like it.”
“Nor I,” Chang admitted. The iron came back into him. “But we have our orders.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Read your history, Citizen Hunyadi. Read your history. No empire which tolerated rebellion ever endured long thereafter. And we are the wall between humanity and Merseian—”
A scream broke through.
And suddenly war was no problem in logistics, search patterns, or games theory. It entered the ship with pain in one hand and blood on the other; and its footfalls thundered.
“Bees, millions of things like bees, out of the woods—oh, God, coming inboard, the boys’re doubled over, one sting hurts enough to knock you crazyYaaahhhh!”
“Close all locks! Seal all compartments! All hands in spacesuits!”
“Marine Colonel Deschamps to Prime Command. Detachments report small groups of women, unarmed, as they land. Women appear anxious to surrender. Request orders.”
“Take them prisoners, of course. Stand around them. You may not be attacked then. But if a unit notes a dense insect swarm, the men are to seal their armor and discharge lethal gas at once.”
“Lock Watch Four to bridge! We can’t shut the lock here! Some enormous animal—like a, a nightmare crocol dile—burst in from the woods—blocking the valves with its body—”
“Energy weapons, sweep the surrounding, forest. All aircraft, return to bomb and strafe this same area.”
Atomic warheads and poisons could not be used, when the ship would be caught in their blast or the gases pour in through three airlocks jammed open by slain monsters. But some gunners had buttoned up their turrets in advance of the bees. Their cannon hurled bolt after bolt, trees exploded and burned and fell, rocks fused… and fog poured in like an ocean. Simultaneously, the instrumentation and optical aids that should have pierced it failed. The crews must fire at random into horrible wet smoke, knowing they could not cover the whole ground about them.
“Radio dead. Radar dead. Electromagnetic ‘scopes dead. Blanketed by interference. Appears to emanate from… from everywhere… different insects, clouds of them! What scanning stuff we’ve got that still works, sonics, that kind of thing, gives insufficient definition. We’re deaf, dumb, and blind!”
Aircraft began to crash. Their instruments were likewise gone; and they were not meant to collide with entire flocks of birds.
“Marine Colonel Deschamps—reporting—reports received—catastrophe. I don’t know what, except… those women… they turned on our men and—”
Troopers who escaped flew wildly through fog. Birds found them and betrayed them to snipers in treetops. They landed, seeking cover. Arrows whistled from brush, or hellhounds fell upon them.
“Stand by to raise ship.”
“Lock Watch Four reporting—they’ve got in through the fog, under our fire—swarming in, wild men and animals—good-by, Maria, good-by, universe—”
Most aircraft pilots managed to break free. They got above the clouds and ran from that lake. But they were not equipped to evade ground fire of energy weapons with which there was no electronic interference such as continued to plague them. It had been assumed that the marines would take those emplacements. The marines were now dead, or disabled, or fleeing, or captured. The women called their men back to the guns. Stars blossomed and fell through the daylight sky.
“This is. Wolf, commanding the Free People group assigned to HMS Isis. A prisoner tells me this thing communicates with the bridge. Better give up, Captain. We’re inside. We hold the engine room. We can take your whole ship at our leisure—or plant a nuclear bomb. Your auxiliary forces are rapidly being destroyed. I hope you’ll see reason and give up. We don’t want to harm you. It’s no discredit to you, sir, this defeat. Your intelligence service let you down. You met weapons you didn’t know about, uniquely suited to very special circumstances. Tell your men to lay down their arms. We’ll lift the interference blanket if you agree—not skyward, but on ground level, anyhow, so you can call them. Let’s stop spilling lives and begin talking terms.”
Chang felt he had no choice.
Soon afterward, he and his principal officers stood outside. The men who guarded them were clad and equipped like savages; but they spoke with courtesy. “I would like you gentlemen to meet some friends,” said the one named ICarlsarm. From the forest, toward the captured flying tower, walked a number of women. They were more beautiful than could be imagined.
Ridenour was among the last to go aboard. Not that there were many—a skeleton staff of chosen Imperialist officers, for the aphrodites could not make captives of more in the short time available, those women ‘themselves, whoever of the army possessed abilities even slightly useful in space warship. But perhaps the measure of Karlsarm’s audacity was his drafting of a known spy.
Whose loyalties had not been altered.
Standing in cold, blowing fogbanks, Ridenour shuddered. The cruiser was dim to his eyes, her upper sections lost. Water soaked the earth and dripped from a thousand unseen trees; the insects that made this weather flitted ceaselessly between lake and air, in such myriads that their wingbeats raised an underlying sussuration; a wild beast bellowed, a wild bird shrilled—tones of the wilderness. But the outback reaches were not untamed nature. Like some great animal, they had been harnessed for man, and in turn, something of theirs had entered the human heart.