by Joe Haldeman
The cat was rubbing against my ankle; I picked it up and stroked it. ‘Tell Hilleboe to call a general assembly. Might as well break it to everyone at once.’
The men and women didn’t take it very well, and I couldn’t blame them. We had all expected the Taurans to attack much sooner — and when they persisted in not coming, the feeling grew that Strike Force Command had made a mistake and that they’d never show up at all.
I wanted the company to start weapons training in earnest; they hadn’t used any high-powered weapons in almost two years. So I activated their laser-fingers and passed out the grenade and rocket launchers. We couldn’t practice inside the base for fear of damaging the external sensors and defensive laser ring. So we turned off half the circle of gigawatt lasers and went out about a klick beyond the perimeter, one platoon at a time, accompanied by either me or Charlie. Rusk kept a close watch on the early-warning screens. If anything approached, she would send up a flare, and the platoon would have to get back inside the ring before the unknown came over the horizon, at which time the defensive lasers would come on automatically. Besides knocking out the unknown, they would fry the platoon in less than .02 second.
We couldn’t spare anything from the base to use as a target, but that turned out to be no problem. The first tachyon rocket we fired scooped out a hole twenty meters long by ten wide by five deep; the rubble gave us a multitude of targets from twice-man-sized on down.
The soldiers were good, a lot better than they had been with the primitive weapons in the stasis field. The best laser practice turned out to be rather like skeetshooting: pair up the people and have one stand behind the other, throwing rocks at random intervals. The one who was shooting had to gauge the rock’s trajectory and zap it before it hit the ground. Their eye-hand coordination was impressive (maybe the Eugenics Council had done something right). Shooting at rocks down to pebble-size, most of them could do better than nine out of ten. Old non-bioengineered me could hit maybe seven out of ten, and I’d had a good deal more practice than they had.
They were equally facile at estimating trajectories with the grenade launcher, which was a more versatile weapon than it had been in the past. Instead of shooting one-microton bombs with a standard propulsive charge, it had four different charges and a choice of one-, two-, three- or four-microton bombs. And for really close in-fighting, where it was dangerous to use the lasers, the barrel of the launcher would unsnap, and you could load it with a magazine of ‘shotgun’ rounds. Each shot would send out an expanding cloud of a thousand tiny flechettes that were instant death out to five meters and turned to harmless vapor at six.
The tachyon rocket launcher required no skill whatsoever. All you had to do was to be careful no one was standing behind you when you fired it; the backwash from the rocket was dangerous for several meters behind the launching tube. Otherwise, you just lined your target up in the crosshairs and pushed the button. You didn’t have to worry about trajectory; the rocket traveled in a straight line for all practical purposes. It reached escape velocity in less than a second.
It improved the troops’ morale to get out and chew up the landscape with their new toys. But the landscape wasn’t fighting back. No matter how physically impressive the weapons were, their effectiveness would depend on what the Taurans could throw back. A Greek phalanx must have looked pretty impressive, but it wouldn’t do too well against a single man with a flamethrower.
And as with any engagement, because of time dilation, there was no way to tell what sort of weaponry they would have. They might have never heard of the stasis field. Or they might be able to say a magic word and make us disappear.
I was out with the fourth platoon, burning rocks, when Charlie called and asked me to come back in, urgent. I left Heimoff in charge.
‘Another one?’ The scale of the holograph display was such that our planet was pea-sized, about five centimeters from the X that marked the position of Sade-138. There were forty-one red and green dots scattered around the field; the key identified number 41 as Tauran Cruiser (2).
‘You called Antopol?’
‘Yeah.’ He anticipated the next question. ‘It’ll take almost a day for the signal to get there and back.’
‘It’s never happened before,’ but of course Charlie knew that.
‘Maybe this collapsar is especially important to them.’
‘Likely.’ So it was almost certain we’d be fighting on the ground. Even if Antopol managed to get the first cruiser, she wouldn’t have a fifty-fifty chance on the second one. Low on drones and fighters. ‘I wouldn’t like to be Antopol now.’
‘She’ll just get it earlier.’
‘I don’t know. We’re in pretty good shape.’
‘Save it for the troops, William.’ He turned down the display’s scale to where it showed only two objects: Sade-138 and the new red dot, slowing moving.
We spent the next two weeks watching dots blink out. And if you knew when and where to look, you could go outside and see the real thing happening, a hard bright speck of white light that faded in about a second.
In that second, a nova bomb had put out over a million times the power of a gigawatt laser. It made a miniature star half a klick in diameter and as hot as the interior of the sun. Anything it touched it would consume. The radiation from a near miss could botch up a ship’s electronics beyond repair — two fighters, one of ours and one of theirs, had evidently suffered that fate, silently drifting out of the system at a constant velocity, without power.
We had used more powerful nova bombs earlier in the war, but the degenerate matter used to fuel them was unstable in large quantities. The bombs had a tendency to explode while they were still inside the ship. Evidently the Taurans had the same problem — or they had copied the process from us in the first place — because they had also scaled down to nova bombs that used less than a hundred kilograms of degenerate matter. And they deployed them much the same way we did, the warhead separating into dozens of pieces as it approached the target, only one of which was the nova bomb.
They would probably have a few bombs left over after they finished off Masaryk II and her retinue of fighters and drones. So it was likely that we were wasting time and energy in weapons practice.
The thought did slip by my conscience that I could gather up eleven people and board the fighter we had hidden safe behind the stasis field. It was pre-programmed to take us back to Stargate.
I even went to the extreme of making a mental list of the eleven, trying to think of eleven people who meant more to me than the rest. Turned out I’d be picking six at random.
I put the thought away, though. We did have a chance, maybe a damned good one, even against a fully-armed cruiser. It wouldn’t be easy to get a nova bomb close enough to include us inside its kill-radius.
Besides, they’d space me for desertion. So why bother?
Spirits rose when one of Antopol’s drones knocked out the first Tauran cruiser. Not counting the ships left behind for planetary defense, she still had eighteen drones and two fighters. They wheeled around to intercept the second cruiser, by then a few light hours away, still being harassed by fifteen enemy drones.
One of the Tauran drones got her. Her ancillary crafts continued the attack, but it was a rout. One fighter and three drones fled the battle at maximum acceleration, looping up over the plane of the ecliptic, and were not pursued. We watched them with morbid interest while the enemy cruiser inched back to do battle with us. The fighter was headed back for Sade-138, to escape. Nobody blamed them. In fact, we sent them a farewell/good luck message; they didn’t respond, naturally, being zipped up in the tanks. But it would be recorded.
It took the enemy five days to get back to the planet and be comfortably ensconced in a stationary orbit on the other side. We settled in for the inevitable first phase of the attack, which would be aerial and totally automated: their drones against our lasers. I put a force of fifty men and women inside the stasis field, in case one of the drones got
through. An empty gesture, really; the enemy could just stand by and wait for them to turn off the field, fry them the second it flickered out.
Charlie had a weird idea that I almost went for.
‘We could boobytrap the place.’
‘What do you mean?’ I said. ‘This place is booby-trapped, out to twenty-five klicks.’
‘No, not the mines and such. I mean the base itself, here, underground.’
‘Go on.’
‘There are two nova bombs in that fighter.’ He pointed at the stasis field through a couple of hundred meters of rock. ‘We can roll them down here, boobytrap them, then hide everybody in the stasis field and wait.’
In a way it was tempting. It would relieve me from any responsibility for decision-making, leave everything up to chance. ‘I don’t think it would work, Charlie.’
He seemed hurt. ‘Sure it would.’
‘No, look. For it to work, you have to get every single Tauran inside the kill-radius before it goes off — but they wouldn’t all come charging in here once they breached our defenses. Least of all if the place seemed deserted. They’d suspect something, send in an advance party. And after the advance party set off the bombs—’
‘We’d be back where we started, yeah. Minus the base. Sorry.’
I shrugged. ‘It was an idea. Keep thinking, Charlie.’ I turned my attention back to the display, where the lopsided space war was in progress. Logically enough, the enemy wanted to knock out that one fighter overhead before he started to work on us. About all we could do was watch the red dots crawl around the planet and try to score. So far the pilot had managed to knock out all the drones; the enemy hadn’t sent any fighters after him yet.
I’d given the pilot control over five of the lasers in our defensive ring. They couldn’t do much good, though. A gigawatt laser pumps out a billion kilowatts per second at a range of a hundred meters. A thousand klicks up, though, the beam was attenuated to ten kilowatts. Might do some damage if it hit an optical sensor. At least confuse things.
‘We could use another fighter. Or six.’
‘Use up the drones,’ I said. We did have a fighter, of course, and a swabbie attached to us who could pilot it. It might turn out to be our only hope, if they got us cornered in the stasis field.
‘How far away is the other guy?’ Charlie asked, meaning the fighter pilot who had turned tail. I cranked down the scale, and the green dot appeared at the right of the display. ‘About six light hours.’ He had two drones left, too near to him to show as separate dots, having expended one in covering his getaway. ‘He’s not accelerating any more, but he’s doing point nine gee.’
‘Couldn’t do us any good if he wanted to.’ Need almost a month to slow down.
At that low point, the light that stood for our own defensive fighter faded out. ‘Shit.’
‘Now the fun starts. Should I tell the troops to get ready, stand by to go topside?’
‘No … have them suit up, in case we lose air. But I expect it’ll be a little while before we have a ground attack.’ I turned the scale up again. Four red dots were already creeping around the globe toward us.
I got suited up and came back to Administration to watch the fireworks on the monitors.
The lasers worked perfectly. All four drones converged on us simultaneously; were targeted and destroyed. All but one of the nova bombs went off below our horizon (the visual horizon was about ten kilometers away, but the lasers were mounted high and could target something at twice that distance). The bomb that detonated on our horizon had melted out a semicircular chunk that glowed brilliantly white for several minutes. An hour later, it was still glowing dull orange, and the ground temperature outside had risen to fifty degrees Absolute, melting most of our snow, exposing an irregular dark gray surface.
The next attack was also over in a fraction of a second, but this time there had been eight drones, and four of them got within ten klicks. Radiation from the glowing craters raised the temperature to nearly 300 degrees. That was above the melting point of water, and I was starting to get worried. The fighting suits were good to over a thousand degrees, but the automatic lasers depended on low-temperature superconductors for their speed.
I asked the computer what the lasers’ temperature limit was, and it printed out TR 398-734-009-265, ‘Some Aspects Concerning the Adaptability of Cryogenic Ordnance to Use in Relatively High-Temperature Environments,’ which had lots of handy advice about how we could insulate the weapons if we had access to a fully-equipped armorer’s shop. It did note that the response time of automatic-aiming devices increased as the temperature increased, and that above some ‘critical temperature,’ the weapons would not aim at all. But there was no way to predict any individual weapon’s behavior, other than to note that the highest critical temperature recorded was 790 degrees and the lowest was 420 degrees.
Charlie was watching the display. His voice was flat over the suit’s radio. ‘Sixteen this time.’
‘Surprised?’ One of the few things we knew about Tauran psychology was a certain compulsiveness about numbers, especially primes and powers of two.
‘Let’s just hope they don’t have 32 left.’ I queried the computer on this; all it could say was that the cruiser had thus far launched a total of 44 drones and that some cruisers had been known to carry as many as 128.
We had more than a half-hour before the drones would strike. I could evacuate everybody to the stasis field, and they would be temporarily safe if one of the nova bombs got through. Safe, but trapped. How long would it take the crater to cool down, if three or four — let alone sixteen — of the bombs made it through? You couldn’t live forever in a fighting suit, even though it recycled everything with remorseless efficiency. One week was enough to make you thoroughly miserable. Two weeks, suicidal. Nobody had ever gone three weeks, under field conditions.
Besides, as a defensive position, the stasis field could be a death-trap. The enemy has all the options since the dome is opaque; the only way you can find out what they’re up to is to stick your head out. They didn’t have to wade in with primitive weapons unless they were impatient. They could keep the dome saturated with laser fire and wait for you to turn off the generator. Meanwhile harassing you by throwing spears, rocks, arrows into the dome — you could return fire, but it was pretty futile.
Of course, if one man stayed inside the base, the others could wait out the next half-hour in the stasis field. If he didn’t come get them, they’d know the outside was hot. I chinned the combination that would give me a frequency available to everybody echelon 5 and above.
‘This is Major Mandella.’ That still sounded like a bad joke.
I outlined the situation to them and asked them to tell their troops that everyone in the company was free to move into the stasis field. I would stay behind and come retrieve them if things went well — not out of nobility, of course; I preferred taking the chance of being vaporized in a nano-second, rather than almost certain slow death under the gray dome.
I chinned Charlie’s frequency. ‘You can go, too. I’ll take care of things here.’
‘No, thanks,’ he said slowly. ‘I’d just as soon … Hey, look at this.’
The cruiser had launched another red dot, a couple of minutes behind the others. The display’s key identified it as being another drone. ‘That’s curious.’
‘Superstitious bastards,’ he said without feeling.
It turned out that only eleven people chose to join the fifty who had been ordered into the dome. That shouldn’t have surprised me, but it did.
As the drones approached, Charlie and I stared at the monitors, carefully not looking at the holograph display, tacitly agreeing that it would be better not to know when they were one minute away, thirty seconds … And then, like the other times, it was over before we knew it had started. The screens glared white and there was a yowl of static, and we were still alive.
But this time there were fifteen new holes on the horizon — or closer! �
� and the temperature was rising so fast that the last digit in the readout was an amorphous blur. The number peaked in the high 800s and began to slide back down.
We had never seen any of the drones, not during that tiny fraction of a second it took the lasers to aim and fire. But then the seventeenth one flashed over the horizon, zig-zagging crazily, and stopped directly overhead. For an instant it seemed to hover, and then it began to fall. Half the lasers had detected it, and they were firing steadily, but none of them could aim; they were all stuck in their last firing position.
It glittered as it dropped, the mirror polish of its sleek hull reflecting the white glow from the craters and the eerie flickering of the constant, impotent laser fire. I heard Charlie take one deep breath, and the drone fell so close you could see spidery Tauran numerals etched on the hull and a transparent porthole near the tip — then its engine flared and it was suddenly gone.
‘What the hell?’ Charlie said, quietly.
The porthole. ‘Maybe reconnaissance.’
‘I guess. So we can’t touch them, and they know it.’
‘Unless the lasers recover.’ Didn’t seem likely. ‘We better get everybody under the dome. Us, too.’
He said a word whose vowel had changed over the centuries, but whose meaning was clear. ‘No hurry. Let’s see what they do.’
We waited for several hours. The temperature outside stabilized at 690 degrees — just under the melting point of zinc, I remembered to no purpose — and I tried the manual controls for the lasers, but they were still frozen.
‘Here they come,’ Charlie said. ‘Eight again.’
I started for the display. ‘Guess we’ll—’
‘Wait! They aren’t drones.’ The key identified all eight with the legend Troop Carrier.
‘Guess they want to take the base,’ he said. ‘Intact.’
That, and maybe try out new weapons and techniques. ‘It’s not much of a risk for them. They can always retreat and drop a nova bomb in our laps.’
I called Brill and had her go get everybody who was in the stasis field, set them up with the remainder of her platoon as a defensive line circling around the northeast and northwest quadrants. I’d put the rest of the people in the other half-circle.