" . . . Red-seven, red-seven, horseback dawn, horseback dawn! . . . Jato. Blue-forty, jato, damn it! . . . Red-ten, red-ten, washout, washout!"
As a frontliner herself, Gweanvin had worked with Guardsmen enough to be familiar with their command language. But she could make only limited sense out of what she was hearing. Dargow was using a couple of terms she had never heard before, such as "horseback dawn." And she wasn't sure such familiar commands as "jato" meant the same thing here on Jopat as back home.
Here, after all, the language was being used in a situation that had never existed before—a pitched battle between massed forces of Guardsmen. In the econo-war, Guardsmen guarded. They defended their worlds, whether in the Primgranese Commonality or the Lontastan Federation, against entry by such enemy frontliners as spies, saboteurs and subverters. Occasionally a squad would vector out a few light-years to the assistance of a returning and hotly pursued frontliner, and a brief running battle would ensue. But never anything so insane as this combat on a wildworld.
Gweanvin grimaced in disgust. What boneheads these genetic barbarians were! Very useful in keeping the econo-war honest, very competitive, very high-survival—but boneheads!
She went full inert and let her momentum carry her slowly downward, her velocity perhaps ten thousand miles per hour relative to the planet. Except for being hungry after five days in space, she had no reason to hurry. Could be that it might be best to let the battle end before she tried to land. She had now located the scene of conflict as the late-afternoon zone, and she guessed hostilities would end by the time night fell if not before.
A Lontastan voice, speaking uncoded, suddenly boomed at her: "Hey, you at forty-seven thousand altitude! Identify yourself!"
Gweanvin's zerburst pistol was in her right hand instantly and her detector implants out full. She had trouble spotting her challengers, with the mass of the planet behind them and they only a few thousand miles up. There appeared to be about twenty of them, hanging south of the battle area, probably as rear guards and observers.
She tongued her toothmike and replied: "I'm Gweanvin Oster of the Commonality. Don't let me interrupt your stupid game. I'll wait here till it's over."
"Like hell you will!" boomed the response. "You got no business up there! You're south of the equator! Haul it north, doxie, or we'll blow you north!"
"Just try it, foghead!" she snarled back, and went on with a suggestion that the Lontastan go amuse himself in a manner both vulgar and physically impossible.
* * *
The twenty vague specks vanished abruptly. Gweanvin held her position a precise two-fifths of a second, then warped away on a minivector of some five thousand miles eastward. At that, she moved a trifle too soon to sucker the entire squad. Only six zerburst lances were fired, to terminate into flares of supersolar energy around the spot she had vacated. Gweanvin fired two quick shots of her own at the sourcepoints of two lances and vectored away quickly without waiting to see the results.
"Gweanvin Oster, what the hell are you doing?" General Dargow's voice was blasting at her. He sounded angry and concerned. "Vector north, girl!"
"Stay out of this, General Bonehead," she snapped, making another miniwarp when she found herself without a clear target.
"You're breaking our rules!" he protested furiously.
Her new breakout point put her close enough to one Lontastan for her to drill him cleanly through the belly. Her lance flared late, however, a hundred miles on the other side of him. Still, he would be one sick barb for a couple of weeks. "So what?" she snorted as she fired.
"So we'll come help the Lonnies blast you, if you keep fooling around!" yelled Dargow. "You'll still be gas when the universe coalesces!"
Her new minivector carried Gweanvin straight down, as close as she could warp toward the atmosphere without traumatizing herself. Here she had a few seconds respite from detection. "Send men you don't want!" she retorted warningly. As soon as she had the Lontastans above her well located, she miniwarped into their midst. This time she stayed long enough to get off three shots before making another quick drop out of normspace. She had an advantage in that she could shoot at any target she detected, whereas the Lontastans needed an extra split-second to make sure an unwarping figure was not one of their comrades.
She grinned. Playing a lone hand had its good points.
Dargow's voice was still yelling in her ear, threatening to send Primgranese fighters out to help the Lonnies blast her. But she made no response. Dargow was smart enough to know that mixing a squad of Grannies with the Lonnies would only add to the confusion already working for her, so his threat could be considered idle. She concentrated on her deadly game.
A few seconds later she noted that Dargow's yells were no longer directed at her but at some Lontastan commander. "Pull your men back!" he was urging. "Ignore her. She's just an interloper from back home, not working with me!"
* * *
The general's new tack suddenly worked. The space around Gweanvin emptied as the Lonnie squad warped away.
She blinked and looked around. Far below three bodies were tumbling planetward. Two other squadmen, evidently wounded and with damaged transport implants, were going down in controlled inert mode. That made a Lonnie casualty list of six, she figured, because she was sure she had flared one into vapor.
Below, the barb battle had ended, too, evidently broken off short because of the distraction she had created. She could hear a bedlam of pull-back commands over her comm as she vectored northward and began descending toward Primgranese territory.
"Gweanvin Oster, what the hell are you up to?" Dargow snarled.
"Coming in for a landing," she replied nonchalantly. "Give me a location."
"You know what I mean!" he stormed.
"Yes, I know. I also know I'm not playing your damn-fool game so I don't have to abide by its silly rules. I wasn't bothering the Lonnies, until they came up and started shooting. Are you going to give me a location?"
"No! I'm telling you to warp for home right now."
"Nuts to that. I've been in space five days and I'm starving. Welcome or not, I'm coming down to eat."
"Okay, damn it! Somebody will meet you at forty-one north, four forty-five realtime solar. But tomorrow you head for home, girl."
"That's tomorrow's problem," she replied.
2
As she hit the fringe of Jopat's atmosphere her shieldscreen stiffened automatically, protecting her body from air friction. At the same time the screen bulged out to act as braking wings. A few minutes later her breathing went exterior. After five days with nothing to do, her nose sniffed the fresh smell of Jopat's air with appreciation.
She holstered her gun as she approached the location the general had given her. There she detected only one barb waiting for her, hovering at five thousand feet. She swooped to a halt six feet in front of him and saw that it was Nathel Gromon.
He grinned at her. "Well, well, Skinny Hips." He chuckled. "Come all this way because you can't live without me. Right?"
"Meatheads aren't my type," she retorted.
He chuckled some more. "And you're not old Spart Dargow's type, chicken. He's mad enough to skin you."
"This conversation reminds me of how hungry I am, for some reason," she said.
"Okay. Follow me down."
The barb dropped groundward, leveled off sharply just above the treetops and headed westward. Gweanvin trailed him closely.
"One thing puzzles me about you, Nathel," she said.
"What's that?"
"Most of you idiots came to Jopat because the econo-war back home was fizzling, and out here you and the Lonnies could have a little war of your own. That made a primitive kind of sense under the circumstances. There was nothing for genetic barbarians to do at home, and nobody seemed to know how to get the econo-war heated up again. I even dropped out myself for a couple of years . . ."
"I remember."
"But you stuck out the doldrums at home, Nathel. You didn't leave until thre
e months ago. That was after our Bauble telepathic communicators had been developed to put the Commonality back on even terms with the Lontastans and their telepath, Monte. The econo-war was coming to life again. Guardsmen were needed—especially for planets where Baubles were being installed. There was the prospect of plenty of action for you. And that was precisely when you pulled out. Why?"
Nathel Gromon grimaced. "You said the dirty word. Bauble."
"What does the Bauble have to do with it?"
"It opened my eyes," he grunted. "It showed me how other people really think of us barbs."
"How do they think?"
"Oh . . . that we're stupid."
"Hell, did you need telepathy to find that out?" She snorted. "I've called you stupid a hundred times! Did you think I was kidding?"
Gromon frowned uncomfortably. "It's not the same thing. You and me mentacommed once, if you recall, after they got the Bauble on Prima Gran."
Gweanvin nodded. "How could I forget?"
"Well, the way you thought about me was okay. You think kind of hard and snotty about everybody, did you know that? But all them pencil-pushers . . . it's like I'm some kind of animal, the way they look at it."
"Aw-w-w," Gweanvin cooed mockingly. "Did the mean old pencil-pushers hurt Nathel's tender little feelings?"
"Go to hell," the big man grunted. "It's just that who needs it! The econo-war is a pencil-pusher's war. It fits them, not us. Hell, they outnumber us a million to one. It has to be their kind of fight. So I say, let them have it their way, and we'll stay on Jopat and have ours our way."
Gweanvin shrugged. "Prima Gran sent twenty doctrinists out here a few weeks ago. They were supposed to try to reason with you lunkheads. If they couldn't talk you out of such fallacious attitudes as that, far be it from me to even try." After a moment, she added, "All those doctrinists suddenly went out-comm. What happened to them?"
Gromon grinned. "Oh, we listened to them, till they started repeating themselves. That got too boring, so we field-stripped them and grounded them on a semi-tropic island. They're safe enough. The insects here don't like the taste of humans much, and we parleyed with the Lonnies to keep the fighting away from that island."
* * *
Gweanvin was not especially fond of doctrinists but she failed to share Gromon's amusement. Field-stripping a man was as ugly a crime as horse-thievery had been on an earlier frontier, and for the same reason. A man lived and moved by the life-support devices implanted in his body: power packets, shieldscreen generators, inertia nullifiers, propulsors, communicators and so on. To field-strip him—to cut out those devices that could be removed by simple operations—was the dirtiest of dirty tricks. In the econo-war not even captured frontliners were subjected to such treatment.
But Gweanvin saw no point to making an issue of the transgression. She could guess that the barbs had made it to put everybody on notice that on Jopat the game was played by barb rules, and outsiders had better not try to interfere.
"Getting back to the way pencil-pushers think of barbs," she said, "that's something the doctrinists, being pencil-pushers themselves, could hardly explain to you. They take that attitude toward all frontliners—toward me the same as toward you idiots. And it boils down to the fact that they just don't dig killing or being killed. They can't play, or even appreciate, a game played on that level."
"They're narrow," growled Gromon. "Killing is just bodies. If I get killed, all I got to do is find me a new one. And that ain't hard, because babies are being born every second."
"Right," Gweanvin agreed. "You know, all through history the most atheistic societies, the ones that didn't believe in the survival of the ego-field, were the most squeamish about killing."
"But that don't hold any more," objected the barb. "People don't have ignorance as an excuse now."
"No, but they have other reasons. Killing is destructive, wasteful—and the whole point of the econo-war is to have hard competition that is essentially constructive. It can't be all one way, true. But the vast majority of participants, the pencil-pushers, have to view conflict as a motivator for non-destructive activities."
Gromon grunted noncommittally.
"Also," Gweanvin went on, "killing and being killed are both traumatic. They were basic to the anatomy of unsanity. Pysch-releasing removed that problem quite a few centuries ago, of course, but the old association with unsanity gives killing an ugliness that's still remembered."
"Well, I can see all that," Gromon conceded, "but you ain't talking me into going back, girl. I like it here."
"Hell," Gweanvin grunted, "if twenty glib doctrinists couldn't talk some sense through your thick skulls, I'm not going to try. Propagandizing's not my line."
Gromon turned his head toward her briefly to study her emo-pattern. "Old Dargow figures Prima Gran sent you out here to bring us home," he said. "Do you say different?"
"No. That's what I'm here for."
"Well, how can you do it, if you don't talk us into it?" he demanded. "You can't force us to go back."
"I'll be damned if I know, Nathel," she replied, flashing annoyed frustration. "I'm flying blind on this stupid mission, and that's the disgusting truth."
Gromon considered this information with surprise for several seconds before chuckling. "I guess we really got the high brass running in circles back at Prima Gran HQ," he said smugly.
"Maybe so," murmured Gweanvin.
She had puzzled over the question for hours during her flight to Jopat, and it still made no sense to her. This mission wasn't spying. It wasn't sabotage. And if it was subversion, it was not the kind she was accustomed to. So, being none of those three, the mission simply wasn't in her line of work.
And in the past, even when engaged in work that was her line, Gweanvin had always gone out with detailed and specific orders—with a plan to put into operation. But this time all she had been told by the Special Assignments Bureau was to go to Jopat and bring the Primgranese Guardsmen home.
Gromon had been watching her emo as she glummed over her problem, and was radiating glee. "This is going to hand everybody here a hell of a big laugh," he chortled. "I can't wait to see old Dargow's face when I tell him! But slow down. We're on top of my camp."
Gweanvin followed him as he eased down among the tall trees to come to ground in a widely dispersed and rustic-looking campsite. A well-endowed young woman with dark hair was watching them from beside a stone fireplace, on which a crude earthware pot of stew simmered. It sent out odors fit to drive Gweanvin mad.
"Gweanvin, meet Valla," Gromon muttered, a touch of embarrassment showing. Gweanvin knew Gromon's wife, a barb named Samis, who had refused to come to Jopat with her husband. Guardsmen seldom had difficulty getting women, however, barb or otherwise. Gweanvin was not surprised to find a young beauty presiding over Gromon's cookfire.
Valla's emo-pattern showed dislike and misgiving for a moment as she studied Gweanvin's slim, almost boyish figure. Then, evidently deciding that such a wispy though pretty girl was no real competition, she smiled. Half-regretfully, Gweanvin decided not to disabuse her on that score. On a wilderness world like Jopat it would be foolish to get on bad terms with a talented cook, while available men were more than plentiful.
"That stew smells wonderful, Valla," she cooed.
* * *
Before Gweanvin had more than started eating, numerous barbs began dropping by that part of the camp. Some were old friends of hers desiring to renew acquaintanceship; most were strangers eager for a close look at the doll-faced little dish of dynamite whose skirmish with a whole squad of Lonnies had tizzied the top brass of both sides. Gromon, meanwhile, drifted away, presumably to report to General Dargow.
Gweanvin enjoyed the evening—being the center of attention was always fun. At least ten of the younger AWOL Guardsmen, either unattached to women or lightly attached, courted her unsuccessfully. Not that she didn't regard sex as fun. It was just that she would not want the barbs to think of her as a camp-follower and,
with her thus classified to their satisfaction, dismiss her from their curiosity. To accomplish anything at all toward the completion of her mission, she felt, she would need to keep the barbs attentive—and if possible, mystified.
The cookfire was finally permitted to die down and the last of the visitors departed. Gromon had returned, but Valla had already discreetly lured him away to safety, evidently suspecting from the male attention Gweanvin was getting that she had underestimated the Prima Gran girl as potential competition.
Gweanvin chuckled to herself. Women were bigger idiots than barbs sometimes. That chick Valla, trying to own Nathel Gromon, who was certain to drift back to his wife sooner or later. If he didn't get vaporized first, of course.
She yawned, went semi-inert, and kicked herself up into a secluded treetop. There she hooked a beltsnap around a limb as a tether, and relaxed. After a moment she activated her tightbeam comm, tongued her toothmike, and said softly:
The Creatures of Man Page 44