“Contact!” he yelled, and led the trap teams into a carefully planned maneuver designed to bedevil and frustrate the Solan Corporation’s last and only word on Reever-containment.
The final eight men of the boob-bait detail advanced cautiously, in a precise semi-circle, spaced at ten-yard intervals. Another scream from the shadowed area near the buildings further pinpointed the autosentinel’s location. Two panting members of the kickoff team hove into view.
As Blue signaled them into the semi-circle, one gasped, “The stunters are bringing ’im over!”
“Tom needs another minute,” Blue growled, continuing the precision advance. An instant later, Boob crabbed into the moonlight, antennae whipping menacingly, the big crystal eyes blazing in circular sweeps.
Two stunt men raced in against his right flank. An antenna quivered, curled, then froze momentarily as a sensor took the reading. The stunters dug in, reversed, and crossed each other in a diving leap. An ultrasonic gun whirred, missed, and corrected as one of the stunters, a wiry youth with flying hair, realized that he had crossed the invisible safety line and frantically flipped into a rolling tumble toward the outside. The gun whirred again. The youth screamed and leapt into air as a sudden electrical storm erupted in his brain and convulsed the entire neuromuscular structure. He crashed to the ground and writhed about in an epileptic-like seizure. His partner shouted, “Hey Boob!” and ran a tight figure-eight pattern directly in front of the blazing eyes. Meanwhile, Blue’s harassment circle had been forged, and Boob was surrounded by taunting, dancing, and stunting Reevers. They had learned their lessons well, and were executing with precision.
The Boob guns were whirring ceaselessly, now, as the big machine crabbed and plunged, knelt and leapt, fired and missed and fired again and again at the fast-moving profusion of targets. Here and there, a man would scream and twitch to the ground in mindless spasm.
Blue, standing calmly at the edge of the fire-zone, was picking up fringe-area reverbs of the zinging ultrasonic blasts but stubbornly held his ground, both hands to his head, barking the signals of play. Half of his force now lay shuddering and twitching on the ground. Still, the autosentinel was being held prisoner of his own sensors as it blindly reacted to each parry of the Reevers, shuttling back and forth, wheeling in erratic circles and firing at every movement across its perceptor zones.
Blue reached the minute-and-a-half count when he fell to his knees and vomited. Through the retching, he yelled, “Break—break and run!” and flung himself into a wild roll toward the trees.
The command came a split second too late. The Boob’s sense-computer had already resolved the crosstug effect of the Reevers’ attack. One sensory bank abruptly went dead and the monstrous automat made a lunge in the other direction, immediately stunning the three men on its live side.
Before the others could react to the sudden offensive tactic, the Boob’s sensors had cycled to the other side. Blue was struck less than ten yards from the trees, and curled into a shuddering fetal ball. The remainder of the Reevers fell quickly.
The bug’s readers were immediately cognizant of the rapidly lowering life-signs in the battle area. The antennae quivered and jerked in the direction of the ground level docks, and Boob scuttled smoothly and silently across the open ground toward the pulse of pounding hearts.
Tom Cole, leaning far out of the open hatch of the Board Island shuttle, dragged the tenth man inside just as the autosentinel reappeared. He pushed the man to the floor, whispered, “Quiet now, quiet,” and made his way cautiously to the viewport as the big bug swung angrily around the dock area. “Hold your breath,” he quietly advised his team. “Slow your heartbeat all you can. Get relaxed, be a vegetable, don’t move, don’t make a sound.”
Boob made two complete passes around the shuttle, antennae waving in a furious search, then halted, wheeled slowly about, scuttled over to its earlier sentry station, folded in its legs, and settled quietly to the ground.
“Good,” Cole whispered. “He’s recharging. Everybody stay put and think sweet thoughts.”
One man was forced to move several minutes later to make way for the loading automat. He did so slowly and quietly.
After another ten minutes of tense stillness, the loader departed and the hatch, slid shut. Seconds later, the automated craft rose vertically from the dock and slipped into the departure corridor, circling slowly over the clearing. Hedge moved up beside Tom Cole at the viewport.
“Close,” Hedge said quietly. “Too damn close.
“Yeah,” Cole replied. “But look at that down there.” The shuttle was passing directly over the site of the Boob-baiting.
“Looks like he zingoed all of ’em.”
“There’s Blue over by the apples,” Hedge muttered. “Damn, Tom. Those are mighty fine boys. They deserve a medal.”
The anti-gravity shuttle had reached the release point and was now accelerating in a smooth climb for altitude. Tom Cole watched the moonswept terrain as it rapidly receded. He sighed, turned to Hedge, and smiled.
“I’m going to give them the guns of Terra 10, Hedge,” he said softly, then turned from the viewport with a smile and added, “and then I’m going to give them Mother Earth.”
“Think you can really do that, Tom?” Hedge muttered.
“Did you think we’d really break out of 23?” Cole countered.
Hedge grinned. “We did, didn’t we.”
“Bet your appleseeds,” Cole said. “Better still, throw ’em away. But not yet—not yet. The whole thing hinges on us getting that Gunner. Somehow, we’ve got to get that Gunner.”
And, of course, they got that Gunner.
CHAPTER FOUR
Trembling Genes
Zach Whaleman’s GPC height potential had been engineered for 6.5 feet, skeletal scale medium-heavy. These physical attributes, typical of the elite Defense Commanders, had been attained by his fifteenth year of growth, and would alone have been enough to insure his notability in any human crowd. Add to this the anomaly of flaming red hair and startlingly blue eyes, and Zach Whaleman was physically more at home with the Reevers than with any other segment of the human race. However, any hint or suggestion that Whaleman may have been born with a reversion of critical genes had been systematically analyzed and rejected early in his life.
A seventh generation conception of the same genetic pattern, the infant Whaleman moreover had been officially graded as “superior” material for the Defense Command Academy. The anomalies were apparently confined to hair and eyes. All other results of the preconception engineering had been right on mark. His physical reference was perfect. He was mentally brilliant with a high aptitude for advanced technology. He would be a natural “loner,” inclined toward selfless service, introverted toward an inner strength and drive for self-realization. He would be resolute and self-reliant. These qualities made Whaleman a natural for the defense command, they also would render him a hopeless misfit in most human undertakings.
Those programmed for satellite-community work, for example, depended almost exclusively upon communal type team living for their greater satisfactions in life. Mining and materials technicians, on the other hand, while personalized in the direction of self-sufficiency in a manner similar to the Defense Commanders, had been found to be more efficient when imbued with an egoistic flair for discovery of self via the accolades received after a discovery of new materials or processes. Government technicians, possessing the same Whaleman genes for selfless service, found their most effective modification in an impersonal drive toward universal justice and goodwill, with a strong brake on self-reliance and too much independent action.
Zach Whaleman, and his “superior” genes, had sailed through the usual social indoctrination phase during his third and fourth years of life. Matriculating at the Defense Academy in his fifth year, he was graduated with honors at the age of twenty, was awarded the rank of Gunner, and immediately assigned to postgraduate work at Mercury Four where Terra 10 was going through final ou
tfitting.
For five years, Whaleman lived aboard the big gunship, overseeing the installation of her batteries and other operational systems, becoming familiar with her power plants and support systems, and working out various engineering modifications.
At the brief commissioning ceremony at Mercury Four, he had been presented with the formal letter of TechCom (Technical Commander), denoting his personal responsibility for the awesome weapons system. Terra 10 was his. He would not, as a rule, live aboard the big ship. She had been designed for robot-remote operation, and Whaleman’s sojourns aboard the gleaming sphere would be limited to infrequent maintenance and modification calls. He would, though, ride her into the initial solar orbit, perform final checkout and alignment routines, and prepare the space dread-naught for her defense responsibilities in the solar-access corridor. This was the consideration uppermost in Whaleman’s mind as he fretted through that first night at Ag-Sta 23. He would humor the Reevers to whatever extent allowed by his timetable if necessary, though, he would resort to stern measures in order to get back aboard Terra 10 in time to receive the ferry squadron.
Actually, Whaleman had talked himself into an acceptance of the situation. He had really formed no plans for filling that three-day time interval before the ferry squadron would be ready to engage Terra 10, and after the initial shock of being kidnapped had worn off, the Defense Commander was finding his enforced visit pleasant enough. The food was good, his quarters adequate, and the heavy atmosphere of the continent sweet with the natural perfumes of growing things.
Almost nostalgically he found himself standing at the open window and gazing up into the pre-dawn skies, thinking of that first visit, so long ago, to this jewel of the solar system, the garden planet Earth. He had been but five years old, a precocious candidate for the Defense Command, enjoying his final cohabitation leave with his parents, Defense Techs Paul Whaler and Joan Mannson. Whaleman remembered little of that first excursion to Earth—only a vague sensing of incredible landscape colorations and almost overpowering scents-and not much more of his parents. He pushed into the edges of the memories, deliberately so, and found not a five-year-old’s remembrance of a strange planet but a little boy’s time-diminished appreciation of those two strangers whom he had called Mother and Father.
Paul Whaler he remembered as towering, broad, and given to booming laughter. He particularly remembered that laugh. It had been a source of embarrassment to his mother. Paul had told him about the human race populating itself off of Earth, and had taken him about in a sky sled to show Zach how the entire planet had been converted into a giant garden in order to provide food for the exploding and now exiled population of Solana—exiled from Earth, of course. There was no room left for people on the Mother Planet, Paul had explained. Every precious square inch of arable land, on this only life-producing planet in the known universe, was under cultivation, and even then the bulk of mankind’s diet was synthesized.
Yes, Zach Whaleman remembered Paul Whaler, even though he had spent less than thirty days altogether with his father. And he remembered Joan Mannson. There had been periods, long ago, when he had dreamed of Joan Mannson nearly every night. She was tall, too, as he recalled, very beautiful, attentive to her stranger-son whenever they were together, forever fussing with Zach’s flaming head of hair—as though, perhaps, she was a bit self-conscious or even embarrassed by the startling anomaly. He did not remember much else about his parents. He had not seen them or the continents of Earth since, and felt no particular sense of loss, except after an occasional dream of lying snuggled to Joan Mannson’s chest, or upon hearing some veteran defense commander’s tall tales of Mother Earth. Occasionally, as a child, he would stand there at the observation deck of the Academy and gaze out upon that glowing ball in the sky and try to remember the scents and vivid colors and wonder if he dreamed all that, also.
Even the dreams of Joan Mannson had become lost after his fourth year at the Academy, the evolution of a gunner being in full spiral and with little of extraneous interests to detract from that development.
At about that point in life when his vocal chords began playing tricks on him and his penis became an object of more than casual interest, Whaleman’s berthing assignment was abruptly shuffled, and he found himself sharing a billet with Laney Furr-Roberts, a thirty-year-old female Education Tech who brought alive again the muted memories of Joan Mann son’s chest.
The memories again fled, though, this time under the dedicated ministrations of the EdTech who taught him of life’s little social rewards via a course labeled “Erotic Indoctrination.” One year later to the day, Zach’s billeting was changed again, to a co-ed dorm, and he saw Laney Furr-Roberts no more except in infrequent and disturbing dreams which seemed to be a blurred composite of Laney and Joan Mannson.
The billets had changed with almost monotonous regularity after that, varying from co-ed, to privacy, to all-male, to robot-companion and then back to co-ed again, during which cycles Zach learned that the sex expression has many facets, none deadly superior to another.
At the age of eighteen, he was transferred to the isolation of intensive gunner training and taught to cope with an imposed asceticism. This, he quickly deduced, was the most difficult phase of his sexual training. He refused to use the chemical depressants offered, instead working out his own mental techniques for suppressing the natural hungers of vibrant youth. This pleased his examiners and added to the overall honors with which he was graduated two years later.
The five years on Terra 10 had, of course, been all but sublime. They represented, to Zach Whaleman, the realization of a lifelong goal. The human expression took a back seat, and the young gunner became almost indistinguishable from the robots alongside which he worked.
This interlude on Earth, under somewhat different circumstances, could have been downright pleasant for Whaleman—or so he was thinking as he stood at the open window of the Reever hut and watched that awe-inspiring miracle of Terran sunrise. And as the growing radiance split the gray shadows of dawn, Zach saw another awe-inspiring sight.
She stood nearly as tall as Whaleman, just outside his window, long yellow hair tumbling in heavy folds down her back—a golden giantess, nude except for a black triangle of shiny plastic at the base of her abdomen, regarding him with a level and unblinking gaze of luminous eyes, deepest blue, large, set into the lovely head at most commanding angles, wide-spaced, strange. Her flesh all over seemed to glow with an inner light—Zach supposed it was a trick of the Terran sunrise. Massive hips exploded outward from nipped waist and oval tummy.
Most interesting to Whaleman were the fantastic breastworks, huge swollen globes of shiny flesh upon her chest, crowned with soft pink suckler tips—no doubt, the Gunner surmised—the mammary evidence of a runaway GPC maternal code. He realized that he was inspecting her with excessive interest but could not help himself. The mammala were exquisitely formed, curiously hard-soft in appearance, and jutting out from the chest in a manner that aroused Whaleman’s engineering curiosity.
He dragged his eyes away from the redshade-1 provocative tips and raised them to meet the girl’s steady gaze. He felt curiously self-conscious and over-formal as he introduced himself.
“Gunner Zach Whaleman,” he said with soft precision.
The girl acknowledged with a curt nod. “I know. I am Stel Rogers/Brandt.”
The words came to Whaleman as a breathlessly musical blur. He said, “Request slow speak, unskronk.”
She repeated the statement in a careful delivery, her facial expression unchanging. Whaleman nodded his understanding and returned once again to an inspection of her chest area. The Gunner had, of course, received elemental education in such anomalies, but this was the first breasted woman he had seen in the flesh. He reached through the window and carefully touched one of the interesting projections, then thoughtfully examined the suckler tip between thumb and finger. The girl stiffened slightly but allowed him to continue the examination, the hint of a smile formi
ng at her lips.
“Mammala first view,” he solemnly informed her, as though to explain his interest.
Her smile grew. She said, “Be kind to Reevers.”
The Gunner’s hand quickly dropped away. “Apology,” he murmured. He touched his head, drawing attention to his own hair. “Anomaly,” he pointed out. “Like same.”
The girl laughed and reached out to run her fingers lightly across the Defense Command insignia on his tunic. A flowing stream of words were mixed in with the musical laughter. He cocked his head and concentrated on her swiftly moving lips, but received only gibberish. She read the dismay on his face and abruptly halted.
“Sorry,” she said soberly. “I forgot. Slow speak. I was just telling you of the terrible time I had duplicating that insignia. Yours is a threaded fabric. I had to use synfab, and the darned stuff splits, and runs and just doesn’t cooperate at all.”
Whaleman caught the words that time, but together they meant nothing at all, and the non-communication disturbed him. The animation of the girl’s face disturbed him. The swollen suspensions at her chest disturbed him. Her height and otherwise angular litheness he found entirely pleasing and comparable to the Defense Command females of his own natural environment. But those mammaries! And that speech!
He forced a smile and said, “You think in language. I do not. Regrets, we do not communicate—regrets.”
He swung away from the window, dismissing the girl and expecting her to go away.
She did not go away. She went around to the door and entered the hut, eyed the interior, and said, “You did not sleep.”
“I will sleep to Jupiter,” he curtly replied, as though speaking to a disfavored child. “Skronk?”
“No,” the girl replied, moving directly in front of him. “I do not skronk, machine man.”
“I am human,” Whaleman said.
Don Pendleton's Science Fiction Collection, 3 Books Box Set, (The Guns of Terra 10; The Godmakers; The Olympians) Page 3