by Joe Haldeman
Under artificial stimulation, the company traveled with great energy for the first six hours, was slowing by the seventh, and ground to an exhausted halt after nine hours and nineteen kilometers. The teddy bears had never lost sight of us and, according to Lucky, had never stopped ‘broadcasting.’ Cortez’s decision was that we would stop for seven hours, each platoon taking one hour of perimeter guard. I was never so glad to have been in the seventh platoon, as we stood guard the last shift and thus were able to get six hours of uninterrupted sleep.
In the few moments I lay awake after finally lying down, the thought came to me that the next time I closed my eyes could well be the last. And partly because of the drug hangover, mostly because of the past day’s horrors, I found that I really didn’t give a shit.
14
Our first contact with the Taurans came during my shift.
The teddy bears were still there when I woke up and replaced Doc Jones on guard. They’d gone back to their original formation, one in front of each guard position. The one who was waiting for me seemed a little larger than normal, but otherwise looked just like all the others. All the grass had been cropped where he was sitting, so he occasionally made forays to the left or right. But he always returned to sit right in front of me, you would say staring if he had had anything to stare with.
We had been facing each other for about fifteen minutes when Cortez’s voice rumbled:
‘Awright everybody, wake up and get hid!’
I followed instinct and flopped to the ground and rolled into a tall stand of grass.
‘Enemy vessel overhead.’ His voice was almost laconic.
Strictly speaking, it wasn’t really overhead, but rather passing somewhat east of us. It was moving slowly, maybe a hundred klicks per hour, and looked like a broomstick surrounded by a dirty soap bubble. The creature riding it was a little more human-looking than the teddy bears, but still no prize. I cranked my image amplifier up to forty log two for a closer look.
He had two arms and two legs, but his waist was so small you could encompass it with both hands. Under the tiny waist was a large horseshoe-shaped pelvic structure nearly a meter wide, from which dangled two long skinny legs with no apparent knee joint. Above that waist his body swelled out again, to a chest no smaller than the huge pelvis. His arms looked surprisingly human, except that they were too long and undermuscled. There were too many fingers on his hands. Shoulderless, neckless. His head was a nightmarish growth that swelled like a goiter from his massive chest. Two eyes that looked like clusters of fish eggs, a bundle of tassels instead of a nose, and a rigidly open hole that might have been a mouth sitting low down where his adam’s apple should have been. Evidently the soap bubble contained an amenable environment, as he was wearing absolutely nothing except his ridged hide, that looked like skin submerged too long in hot water, then dyed a pale orange. ‘He’ had no external genitalia, but nothing that might hint of mammary glands. So we opted for the male pronoun by default.
Obviously, he either didn’t see us or thought we were part of the herd of teddy bears. He never looked back at us, but just continued in the same direction we were headed, .05 rad east of north.
‘Might as well go back to sleep now, if you can sleep after looking at that thing. We move out at 0435.’ Forty minutes.
Because of the planet’s opaque cloud cover, there had been no way to tell, from space, what the enemy base looked like or how big it was. We only knew its position, the same way we knew the position the scout-ships were supposed to land on. So it too could easily have been underwater, or underground.
But some of the drones were reconnaissance ships as well as decoys: and in their mock attacks on the base, one managed to get close enough to take a picture. Captain Stott beamed down a diagram of the place to Cortez — the only one with a visor in his suit — when we were five klicks from the base’s ‘radio’ position. We stopped and he called all the platoon leaders in with the seventh platoon to confer. Two teddy bears loped in, too. We tried to ignore them.
‘OK, the captain sent down some pictures of our objective. I’m going to draw a map; you platoon leaders copy.’ They took pads and styli out of their leg pockets, while Cortez unrolled a large plastic mat. He gave it a shake to randomize any residual charge, and turned on his stylus.
‘Now, we’re coming from this direction.’ He put an arrow at the bottom of the sheet. ‘First thing we’ll hit is this row of huts, probably billets or bunkers, but who the hell knows … Our initial objective is to destroy these buildings — the whole base is on a flat plain; there’s no way we could really sneak by them.’
‘Potter here. Why can’t we jump over them?’
‘Yeah, we could do that, and wind up completely surrounded, cut to ribbons. We take the buildings.’
‘After we do that … all I can say is that we’ll have to think on our feet. From the aerial reconnaissance, we can figure out the function of only a couple of buildings — and that stinks. We might wind up wasting a lot of time demolishing the equivalent of an enlisted-men’s bar, ignoring a huge logistic computer because it looks like … a garbage dump or something.’
‘Mandella here,’ I said. ‘Isn’t there a spaceport of some kind — seems to me we ought to …’
‘I’ll get to that, damn it. There’s a ring of these huts all around the camp, so we’ve got to break through somewhere. This place’ll be closest, less chance of giving away our position before we attack.
‘There’s nothing in the whole place that actually looks like a weapon. That doesn’t mean anything, though; you could hide a gigawatt laser in each of those huts.
‘Now, about five hundred meters from the huts, in the middle of the base, we’ll come to this big flower-shaped structure.’ Cortez drew a large symmetrical shape that looked like the outline of a flower with seven petals. ‘What the hell this is, your guess is as good as mine. There’s only one of them, though, so we don’t damage it any more than we have to. Which means … we blast it to splinters if I think it’s dangerous.
‘Now, as far as your spaceport, Mandella, is concerned — there just isn’t one. Nothing.
‘That cruiser the Hope caulked had probably been left in orbit, like ours has to be. If they have any equivalent of a scoutship, or drone missiles, they’re either not kept here or they’re well hidden.’
‘Bohrs here. Then what did they attack with, while we were coming down from orbit?’
‘I wish we knew, Private.
‘Obviously, we don’t have any way of estimating their numbers, not directly. Recon pictures failed to show a single Tauran on the grounds of the base. Meaning nothing, because it is an alien environment. Indirectly, though … we count the number of broomsticks, those flying things.
‘There are fifty-one huts, and each has at most one broomstick. Four don’t have any parked outside, but we located three at various other parts of the base. Maybe this indicates that there are fifty-one Taurans, one of whom was outside the base when the picture was taken.’
‘Keating here. Or fifty-one officers.’
‘That’s right — maybe fifty thousand infantrymen stacked in one of these buildings. No way to tell. Maybe ten Taurans, each with five broomsticks, to use according to his mood.
‘We’ve got one thing in our favor, and that’s communications. They evidently use a frequency modulation of megahertz electromagnetic radiation.’
‘Radio!’
‘That’s right, whoever you are. Identify yourself when you speak. So it’s quite possible that they can’t detect our phased-neutrino communications. Also, just prior to the attack, the Hope is going to deliver a nice dirty fission bomb; detonate it in the upper atmosphere right over the base. That’ll restrict them to line-of-sight communications for some time; even those will be full of static.’
‘Why don’t … Tate here … why don’t they just drop the bomb right in their laps. Save us a lot of—’
‘That doesn’t even deserve an answer, Private. But the a
nswer is, they might. And you better hope they don’t. If they caulk the base, it’ll be for the safety of the Hope. After we’ve attacked, and probably before we’re far enough away for it to make much difference.
‘We keep that from happening by doing a good job. We have to reduce the base to where it can no longer function; at the same time, leave as much intact as possible. And take one prisoner.’
‘Potter here. You mean, at least one prisoner.’
‘I mean what I say. One only. Potter … you’re relieved of your platoon. Send Chavez up.’
‘All right, Sergeant.’ The relief in her voice was unmistakable.
Cortez continued with his map and instructions. There was one other building whose function was pretty obvious; it had a large steerable dish antenna on top. We were to destroy it as soon as the grenadiers got in range.
The attack plan was very loose. Our signal to begin would be the flash of the fission bomb. At the same time, several drones would converge on the base, so we could see what their antispacecraft defenses were. We would try to reduce the effectiveness of those defenses without destroying them completely.
Immediately after the bomb and the drones, the grenadiers would vaporize a line of seven huts. Everybody would break through the hole into the base … and what would happen after that was anybody’s guess.
Ideally, we’d sweep from that end of the base to the other, destroying certain targets, caulking all but one Tauran. But that was unlikely to happen, as it depended on the Taurans’ offering very little resistance.
On the other hand, if the Taurans showed obvious superiority from the beginning, Cortez would give the order to scatter. Everybody had a different compass bearing for retreat — we’d blossom out in all directions, the survivors to rendezvous in a valley some forty klicks east of the base. Then we’d see about a return engagement, after the Hope softened the base up a bit.
‘One last thing,’ Cortez rasped. ‘Maybe some of you feel the way Potter evidently does, maybe some of your men feel that way … that we ought to go easy, not make this so much of a bloodbath. Mercy is a luxury, a weakness we can’t afford to indulge in at this stage of the war. All we know about the enemy is that they have killed seven hundred and ninety-eight humans. They haven’t shown any restraint in attacking our cruisers, and it’d be foolish to expect any this time, this first ground action.
‘They are responsible for the lives of all of your comrades who died in training, and for Ho, and for all the others who are surely going to die today. I can’t understand anybody who wants to spare them. But that doesn’t make any difference. You have your orders and, what the hell, you might as well know, all of you have a post-hypnotic suggestion that I will trigger by a phrase, just before the battle. It will make your job easier.’
‘Sergeant …’
‘Shut up. We’re short on time; get back to your platoons and brief them. We move out in five minutes.’
The platoon leaders returned to their men, leaving Cortez and ten of us — plus three teddy bears, milling around, getting in the way.
15
We took the last five klicks very carefully, sticking to the highest grass, running across occasional clearings. When we were 500 meters from where the base was supposed to be, Cortez took the third platoon forward to scout, while the rest of us laid low.
Cortez’s voice came over the general freak: ‘Looks pretty much like we expected. Advance in a file, crawling. When you get to the third platoon, follow your squad leader to the left or right.’
We did that and wound up with a string of eighty-three people in a line roughly perpendicular to the direction of attack. We were pretty well hidden, except for the dozen or so teddy bears that mooched along the line, munching grass.
There was no sign of life inside the base. All of the buildings were windowless and a uniform shiny white. The huts that were our first objective were large featureless half-buried eggs some sixty meters apart. Cortez assigned one to each grenadier.
We were broken into three fire teams: team A consisted of platoons two, four, and six; team B was one, three, and five; the command platoon was team C.
‘Less than a minute now — filters down! — when I say “fire,” grenadiers, take out your targets. God help you if you miss.’
There was a sound like a giant’s belch, and a stream of five or six iridescent bubbles floated up from the flower-shaped building. They rose with increasing speed until they were almost out of sight, then shot off to the south, over our heads. The ground was suddenly bright, and for the first time in a long time, I saw my shadow, a long one pointed north. The bomb had gone off prematurely. I just had time to think that it didn’t make too much difference; it’d still make alphabet soup out of their communications—
‘Drones!’ A ship came screaming in just about tree level, and a bubble was in the air to meet it. When they contacted, the bubble popped and the drone exploded into a million tiny fragments. Another one came from the opposite side and suffered the same fate.
‘FIRE!’ Seven bright glares of 500-microton grenades and a sustained concussion that surely would have killed an unprotected man.
‘Filters up.’ Gray haze of smoke and dust. Clods of dirt falling with a sound like heavy raindrops.
‘Listen up:
“Scots, wha hae wi’ Wallace bled;
Scots, wham Bruce has aften led,
Welcome to your gory bed,
Or to victory!”’
I hardly heard him for trying to keep track of what was going on in my skull. I knew it was just post-hypnotic suggestion, even remembered the session in Missouri when they’d implanted it, but that didn’t make it any less compelling. My mind reeled under the strong pseudo-memories: shaggy hulks that were Taurans (not at all what we now knew they looked like) boarding a colonists’ vessel, eating babies while mothers watched in screaming terror (the colonists never took babies; they wouldn’t stand the acceleration), then raping the women to death with huge veined purple members (ridiculous that they would feel desire for humans), holding the men down while they plucked flesh from their living bodies and gobbled it (as if they could assimilate the alien protein) … a hundred grisly details as sharply remembered as the events of a minute ago, ridiculously overdone and logically absurd. But while my conscious mind was rejecting the silliness, somewhere much deeper, down in that sleeping animal where we keep our real motives and morals, something was thirsting for alien blood, secure in the conviction that the noblest thing a man could do would be to die killing one of those horrible monsters …
I knew it was all purest soyashit, and I hated the men who had taken such obscene liberties with my mind, but I could even hear my teeth grinding, feel my cheeks frozen in a spastic grin, blood-lust … A teddy bear walked in front of me, looking dazed. I started to raise my laser-finger, but somebody beat me to it and the creature’s head exploded in a cloud of gray splinters and blood.
Lucky groaned, half-whining. ‘Dirty … filthy fucken bastards.’ Lasers flared and crisscrossed, and all of the teddy bears fell dead.
‘Watch it, goddammit,’ Cortez screamed. ‘Aim those fuckin things — they aren’t toys!’
‘Team A, move out — into the craters to cover B.’
Somebody was laughing and sobbing. ‘What the fuck is wrong with you, Petrov?’ Strange to hear Cortez cussing.
I twisted around and saw Petrov, behind and to my left, lying in a shallow hole, digging frantically with both hands, crying and gurgling.
‘Fuck,’ Cortez said. ‘Team B! Ten meters past the craters, get down in a line. Team C — into the craters with A.’
I scrambled up and covered the hundred meters in twelve amplified strides. The craters were practically large enough to hide a scoutship, some ten meters in diameter. I jumped to the opposite side of the hole and landed next to a fellow named Chin. He didn’t even look around when I landed, just kept scanning the base for signs of life.
‘Team A — ten meters, past team B, down in
line.’ Just as he finished, the building in front of us burped, and a salvo of the bubbles fanned out toward our lines. Most people saw it coming and got down, but Chin was just getting up to make his rush and stepped right into one.
It grazed the top of his helmet and disappeared with a faint pop. He took one step backwards and toppled over the edge of the crater, trailing an arc of blood and brains. Lifeless, spreadeagled, he slid halfway to the bottom, shoveling dirt into the perfectly symmetrical hole where the bubble had chewed indiscriminately through plastic, hair, skin, bone, and brain.
‘Everybody hold it. Platoon leaders, casualty report … check … check, check … check, check, check … check. We have three deaders. Wouldn’t be any if you’d have kept low. So everybody grab dirt when you hear that thing go off. Team A, complete the rush.’
They completed the maneuver without incident. ‘OK. Team C, rush to where B … hold it! Down!’
Everybody was already hugging the ground. The bubbles slid by in a smooth arc about two meters off the ground. They went serenely over our heads and, except for one that made toothpicks out of a tree, disappeared in the distance.
‘B, rush past A ten meters. C, take over B’s place. You B grenadiers, see if you can reach the Flower.’
Two grenades tore up the ground thirty or forty meters from the structure. In a good imitation of panic, it started belching out a continuous stream of bubbles — still, none coming lower than two meters off the ground. We kept hunched down and continued to advance.