“You aren’t paid to imagine that or any other foulin’ thing,” Ixmal chirped sourly over the vibration of the transporter’s engines. The bird had direct impulse drivers, but no navigational aides beyond the pilot’s eyesight, so Duwasson was keeping them low and slow to avoid winding up in orbit. “Except how to get Outpost 27 back in working order fast, before me and the boys bite yer ears off.”
Squad Leader Ixmal wasn’t sure just how he’d carry out the threat, seeing as they were all wearing suits, but the thought brightened his mood and made his whiskers twitch. For that moment he could stop wondering what had happened to Outpost 27.
Ten hours ago the installation’s Ready-to-Go code had stopped sending to the Tower. Only a broken radio. Ixmal would get a technician to find out what happened; ultimately he’d blame a technician, but unexplained events had been evil lately. Evil.
“Pups,” muttered Private Moketric. “The whole burrow did chew on that un, didn’t it just?”
Even Ixmal had to admit that scarcely more than a skeleton remained of the destroyer they’d just scudded over. Though the ship was parked way out here on the edge of the vessels awaiting rebuild, Ixmal had seen multiple movements aboard it during the transporter’s quick overflight. Just like the slickskins here at Bileduct to waste time repairing a wreck like that instead of getting serviceable ships back into action.
The Tumor was parked only a couple rows over, which robbed the squad leader of the minor surge of glee he’d gotten when he thought of eating the technician he was supposed to escort. If the Tumor hadn’t broken down, it wouldn’t be sinking into the slag on this nest-fouling planetoid—
And Squad Leader Ixmal wouldn’t be bouncing his kidneys blue out in the vacuum, checking on why some fouling machine had broken. The only machine that was worth having was an automatic rifle, and teeth were generally better ‘n guns even then.
“Wow!” Estoril repeated.
Ixmal was just short of batting the elf with his rifle butt on general principles when he noticed that Estoril was staring over the bow, toward Outpost 27.
“Wow!” said Squad Leader Ixmal.
The installation was gone, just about. One of the plasma cannon still stood mournfully, but the other three guns had disappeared. There was no sign of the rocket clusters either.
Something glittery was moving over the site, though. Ixmal opened his mouth to order Duwasson to keep them up, but he was three seconds too late. The pilot flared for landing, then chopped his throttles early and dropped the transporter from a meter up. Vacuum hadn’t improved Duwasson’s fouling technique, that was for sure.
“Go! Go! Go!” Ixmal shouted as he leaped from the transporter, snatching a grenade from his belt with one paw while the other forelimb aimed his automatic rifle at the intruder in Outpost 27.
The creature ignored the squad of Khalian troopers. It was cylindrical, about two meters long, and draped in solar panels like the wings of a tasty butterfly.
“Uh-oh,” said Volvon, suggesting that he too recognized the thing’s resemblance to the last load Ixmal’s squad had lifted from Ouroboros.
Ixmal tossed his grenade and ducked, figuring that this was as good a time as any to see which of his privates remembered that shrapnel flies a long way without air to slow it down. All the squad members flattened, Volvon included, worse luck.
The blast knocked a hole in the creature’s casing and sent its solar collectors sailing off like a puff of smoke. Ixmal rose and emptied the magazine of his rifle into the hole. The rest of the squad fired also, though that dungbrain Moketric for some reason shot up the surviving plasma weapon instead of the intruder.
Sparks flew in all directions, hazy blue crackles of electricity and the red glare of burning metal. The intruding machine settled onto its treads with a shiver.
A ball bearing dropped from the rear of the sputtering ruin. “Help!” screamed the elf technician.
Ixmal turned. Estoril had stayed alone in the transporter, peering over the bulkhead which shielded him from ricochets and who knew what.
The elf wasn’t alone anymore. A machine much like the one melting in the wreckage of Outpost 27 had crawled into the vehicle and was devouring the banks of shed-metal seats.
Ixmal cursed and pulled another grenade from his belt. There was going to be hell to pay over this one, of that he was sure.
* * *
Base Commander Smythe could split the flat-screen Operations Room display into as many as sixteen separate facets to track the course of the battle. The technology would have been wonderful if she’d liked what she saw in more of the pictures.
The crater wall still glowed where Outpost 27 had been. Smythe had nuked the site after a Weasel squad retreated from swarms of machines.
Battle, hell. This was a war!
Loadmaster Rao sat beside Smythe, talking angrily to a Weasel officer on the other end of the phone line. Rao’s skin had a grayish cast and hung in folds over what had been a Buddha-like visage. He stopped speaking in mid-bark and stared at the handset which had just gone dead.
A lot of machinery was failing at Bileduct Base just now. One facet of the screen showed patches of light advancing slowly up a crawlspace ahead of the Weasel trooper whose suit held the camera. Something glittery quivered out of sight ahead. The picture jumped violently as bullets ricocheted from and around the escaping machine.
Another facet: the fireball of a plasma burst, so bright that the quarter quadrant went momentarily black. When the picture returned, the boojum’s gutted casing still glowed in the control room of a corvette. That machine had manufactured its last ball bearing.
Of course the control room was glowing slag also. For all practical purposes, the corvette was now fit only for scrap. The wreck might as well be 1500 tonnes of ball bearings for all the good it would do the war effort.
Another facet: a squad of suited Khalians moving purposefully across the crater floor. Ahead of them, three boojums munched on a destroyer. The tough hull plating spat occasional sparks beneath their cutting teeth. The leading Weasel hurled a grenade whose soundless explosion collapsed a boojum’s casing.
The Weasel spun like gauze in a hailstorm while the rock puffed upward around him. He dropped, his atmosphere suit in bloody tatters around the remnants of his body.
As Smythe watched in horror, the two surviving boojums backed toward the squad, carefully realigning their solar wings as they loosed further streams of ball bearings. They’d beefed up their electromagnetic delivery systems considerably over what had sufficed for Mom in the taconite mines of Ouroboros.
Another facet, this one from a transporter Smythe had ordered to search the immediate surroundings of the base when she thought the attack must be coming from outside. There was a fresh crater thirty kilometers from Bileduct Base, easily visible because of the huge solar array in the center of it. Six lines rayed from the power station; at the far end of each line was a boojum which looked a great deal like MM 39.
The six bearing-delivery tubes rose and pointed simultaneously. The image blurred into rushing landscape as the transporter pilot dropped to the deck and wicked up on his throttles . . .
Smythe knuckled her prickling eye sockets. That pest of machines wasn’t doing any particular harm at the moment; anyway, a missile could take care of it easily enough. But if the little bastards kept reproducing—and learning—the base staff wasn’t going to get all of them ever. That much was certain.
Loadmaster Jiketsy bustled into the Operations Room with a slave technician in tow. Normally it would have been doubtful etiquette for a Syndicate officer to bring even a Khalian into this sanctum, but all the rules had gone out the window when the machines declared war on Bileduct Base.
“Sir,” said Rao, too tired to notice that Jiketsy already had his mouth open to speak, “we’ve got to call in support, at least a full battle squadron. I’m readying a corvett
e—”
“No,” said Smythe, without taking her fists away from her eyes.
“Sir,” said Loadmaster Jiketsy, “it’s confirmed that the original thing came in from Ouroboros on the Tumor. This slave—”
Smythe uncovered an eye and stared coldly at Estoril. The elf technician bobbed his head nervously.
“—was there when it was turned on.”
“Well, has anybody thought to turn it off?” Smythe asked in a close approximation of calm reason. She was too exhausted to be furious.
“We melted the Tumor to slag three hours ago,” Rao said. “What was left of it. Using the base defense system on manual override.”
He shrugged. “I suppose we got a lot of them in the mothership’s hull. Got a lot more as the survivors tried to flee. But it didn’t make any difference in the overall—”
A particularly bright flash from the display screen drew a flick of the loadmaster’s eye.
“Overall picture, that is. Sir, we really need to call for help.”
And spend the rest of our careers swabbing toilets in the slave pens, Smythe added mentally.
“You!” she snapped at Estoril. “You were on Ouroboros. Was the place covered with these, these monsters?”
Estoril waggled his ears violently. “Nosir, nosir,” he said. “It was just, you know, a place . . . not that I was, you know, on the ground.”
“They booby-trapped the load before they let us capture it,” Jiketsy snarled. “And with us using idiot Weasels to do the wet work, they knew nobody’d notice till—”
He drew his index finger across his throat.
“Sirs, I think it must have been an accident,” Estoril said. “I mean, the machine didn’t start out, you know, hostile. Maybe the crew—maybe it was dropped when the Khalian master crew brought it aboard?”
Smythe looked at Rao. “You have a corvette ready to lift?”
Rao nodded. “Yessir. I’m glad you—”
“Shut up,” Smythe interrupted. “I want it crewed by Weasels who were on the first Ouroboros raid. I want that tech”—she pointed at Estoril; fur quivered on the elf’s ear tips—“along. I want them to learn how to fix these machines, turn them off—end them. Do you all understand?”
Three heads nodded at the base commander.
“And I want the answer fast!” she added, breaking composure in a scream.
Rao, pasty-faced despite his normally swarthy complexion, began keying access codes into a phone that still worked. Smythe, Jiketsy, and Estoril watched the progress of the battle on the display screen.
Matters were not improving . . .
* * *
Mom was gone, but her spirit lingered on.
There was enough iron and alloying elements in Bileduct’s rocks to continue the making of ball bearings for a reasonable length of time. Some of the materials necessary to produce boojums, the first order of business for the present, were limited to Bileduct Base and its immediate environs.
The boojums, linked by tight-focus radio and subsonic communications through the mantle of Bileduct, watched with dismay as a starship rose from the surface of the base, hovered, and sped away, carrying with it trace elements that could be found nowhere else on the planetoid. Not only that, but the attacks by bands of rabid Weasels with guns, grenades, and plasma weapons had seriously affected production of both bearings and boojums. Some of the latest boojum models were being turned out with heavy armor, but that was a short-term solution.
Mom had taught her kids to take the long view.
Boojums talked as they ran and hid; talked as they shot back; talked as they ate and reproduced and ran and hid and shot back.
Unlike human committees—to say nothing of throat-ripping Khalian clan gatherings—Mom’s kids reached a semi-intelligent consensus within a few seconds of compiling the available data.
The battle continued for several hours among and within the ships grounded at Bileduct Base without apparent change. It took some while to produce boojums to meet the new requirements, after all; but before long finger-length boojums, hidden beneath solar panels which looked like flat hillocks, began to crawl away from the embattled ships.
Because they were so small, it would take them days to reach the defensive clusters in the crater wall. The sensors in the outposts were precise enough to notice the little creatures, but all inputs from within the base were automatically filtered out.
And this time, the boojums knew better than to dismantle the outposts and call down on themselves a point-blank barrage of missiles like those which had finally ended the first attempt to devour the defenses.
The business would take time, but that was all right with the boojums.
* * *
“But you got everything the first time!” wailed the human engineer two of the raiders were dragging onto the cramped bridge of the corvette Carbuncle. The electronic human/Khalian translator in the command console spewed out a translation of sorts in an unpleasant Brightwater Clan accent.
“Silence!” barked Slevskrit. The elf technician bawled something at the human which the console agreed was a proper translation. Someday maybe the fouling machines would handle both sides of the conversation.
By the Great Mother!, how he hated machines.
“When we came to your mud ball before,” Slevskrit said, “we captured one of these.” Somebody at Bileduct Base had managed to find a drawing of MM 39, turned in when the Tumor arrived and filed properly, for a wonder. Slevskrit held the paper out to the human. His claws punctured it. “Do you recognize it?”
Even before Estoril finished his translation, the human squinted at the drawing and said, “Oh, yeah. One of the mining machines from South Continent. Needs to have a power station to work, though.”
“No,” said the elf, unprompted. “It doesn’t.”
The colonists hadn’t resisted this time either. Ouroboros was a fundamentally defenseless world. A single corvette could, hold the planet to ransom just as effectively as the hundred-ship fleet of raiders had done the first time. The firepower needed was still two nuclear missiles, to melt the world’s ice caps and flood the meager land masses along the equator.
Besides, as the engineer was trying to tell them, there was nothing left to steal from Ouroboros!
Nothing but knowledge.
“If you recognize the machine,” said Slevskrit, “then you know how to turn it off. Tell us or —”
The Weasel captain spent some time explaining precisely what the “else” would be. Estoril began translating long before Slevskrit had finished. In fact, the elf seemed to be pretending that he didn’t hear the captain’s lovingly detailed words.
“Turn the machine off?” said the engineer. “Well, throw the switch, of course. There’s a big yellow junction box in the power plant. Just throw—”
“We don’t have the power plant,” Estoril said in human.
The console translated his words in the same fouling Brightwater accent as it did the engineer’s. “Ah . . . some of the units are operating on solar power. Ah, there are a number of the units by now.”
“Ah,” said the human. “Ah, I do see . . .”
Slevskrit bared his fangs. Both non-Weasels jumped.
“Ah, yes,” the human said thoughtfully. “Probably quite a lot of them. The ball-bearing signal would have been effectively turned off when you, ah, liberated the unit. Without that, the unit becomes a von Neumann machine; it just builds more of itself. Be interesting to do the math on that—”
Slevskrit growled. Both slaves jumped again.
“Right,” said the elf. His ears momentarily tried to stuff their furry tips into his aural channels. “What’s a ball-bearing signal and how do we send one?”
“Well, the easiest way to send the signal is to use the transmitter from the original site,” the human explained. “I suppose you
left the power plant in place on South Continent? The lord knows we haven’t gotten around to doing anything about it.”
“Yes,” snarled Slevskrit, furious that the other two had figured out something—and he didn’t have a clue himself, even though he’d heard every word of the conversation. “But what does a ball-bearing signal do!”
Estoril didn’t bother to translate. “It tells the machines what’s needed. Maybe it’s ball-bearings. Maybe it’s molybdenum, or molybdenum steel, or bronze or iridium, but it might as well come as little balls. It . . . see, the signal turns the machines into ball-bearing factories,” he said to the Weasel captain, “instead of ball-bearing factory factories. It won’t destroy the, ah, units that have already been built, but it’ll stop the, ah, production of new units.”
“Right,” said the elf. “And the masters can deal with, the overpopulation by conventional means. Plasma weapons and the like.”
The human shook his head in quiet amazement. “That must really be something to see, wherever you’ve got ‘em.”
Estoril bobbed his ears in agreement.
“One of those Mother-fouling things is overpopulation,” Slevskrit growled.
He reached for the control that would initiate take-off procedures, then paused and said to the troopers who’d brought the prisoner in, “Toss him out the port before we lift.”
Bringing an Alliance human to a Syndicate base would subject them all to punishment worse than what Slevskrit visualized for the engineer if he hadn’t cooperated.
“In pieces?” asked one of the guards hopefully.
“No!” the captain snapped. “Alive. Running.” How could he convey what he meant? “Happy!”
Not because the prisoner had been promised his life if he cooperated.
But the way this whole fouling operation had gone, Slevskrit suspected they might need the hairless turd again.
The Fleet-Book Four Sworn Allies Page 13