by Ben Bova
I should have felt pity for Quint, I know. Instead I felt a smoldering resentment, almost anger.
Frede read my face. “He can’t help it,” she said. “He’s not goldbricking.”
“How do you know?”
She shrugged. “What difference would it make?”
I realized she was right. What difference would it make? Despite all the training, despite being gestated specifically to be a soldier, despite a lifetime of nothing but the military, Quint had taken all the fighting he was ever going to take. I should have seen it coming. I should have realized that while we were fighting for our lives on Lunga he was hiding in a hole somewhere, keeping his head down, unwilling or unable to face the death that the rest of us did not even think about in the heat of action.
“It’s not a good thing for soldiers to think too much,” Frede told me as we left Quint to the medics and went to find our quarters and the rest of the troop.
“Maybe not,” I muttered, thinking of Randa, who did not really believe soldiers were capable of thinking at all.
“You’re now my second-in-command,” I told her as we walked along the metal passageways, guided by the computer displays on the bulkheads. Most of the others in the passageways in this section of the station were humans, although we passed several Tsihn and even a few other species.
She nodded. “Are we going to stay here on this station, or will they ship us to an R-and-R center?”
“No R-and-R,” I said. “We’ve got a new assignment.”
“Without a rest and refit from the last one?” She was immediately indignant.
I suddenly realized that it was my fault. “I asked for you,” I said, “when I got the assignment.”
“What assignment?”
“Bititu. It’s an asteroid in the—”
I stopped. Frede’s eyes seemed to glaze over for a moment. The trigger word. I could have kicked myself. All the data from the subconscious briefing came surging up into her awareness.
“Sheol,” she murmured. “They don’t give you the easy ones, do they?”
“I shouldn’t have asked for you,” I started to apologize. “Maybe I can get you released for R and R.”
“Not now. Not once we’ve been briefed. They’ll either ship us out or freeze us.”
We started walking along the passageway again. I didn’t know what to say. It had never occurred to me that the troopers deserved a spell of rest and recreation after their ordeal on Lunga. Bititu promised to be even worse.
“There’s one glitch in the planning that I’ll have to fix,” Frede told me as we approached the section where we would be quartered.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“The sleeping arrangements. They’ve paired each of us off with other people.”
“That’s standard procedure, isn’t it? The army doesn’t want us forming emotional attachments that are too close.”
“Right. But you’re battalion commander now and rank has its privileges.”
“I don’t know if I should—”
“Not you,” Frede said, her eyes twinkling mischievously. “If I’m your second, then I can pull my rank to supersede the bitch they’ve assigned to you.”
Chapter 19
So when we boarded a Tsihn troopship for the flight to Bititu, Lieutenant Frede was my second-in-command and my bunk-mate.
Our ship joined a sizable battle fleet of cruisers and dreadnoughts. The plan was to make the run to the Jilbert system at superlight velocity, so we could not be detected until the very last moment, when we slowed to relativistic speed. Navigation was going to be tricky, but the Tsihn admiral assured me that they could get us to within a few light-hours of Jilbert.
“In that way,” it told me at one of our conferences in its quarters, “the Hegemony will have no warning time to reinforce the system.”
Its conference room was hot and dry; like being in a sunbaked desert, except that we were seated around an uneven conference table. Half of the table was set at a height to make humans comfortable, the other half several centimeters higher for the comfort of the big senior officers among the reptilians. The admiral, of course, was the biggest of them all: nearly three meters tall when standing, the dun-colored scales of its chest almost completely covered with symbols of rank and distinction.
The walls of the conference room were filled with holograms of arid rocky country and a blazing bronze sky. I was tempted to shield my eyes from the sun, but the brightness actually was never high enough to cause real glare.
“The nearest Hegemony base to Bititu is in the Justice system,” I pointed out. “That’s only a dozen light-years away. The enemy could send a battle fleet to Bititu before we’ve secured the asteroid.”
The admiral flicked its forked tongue in and out almost faster than the eyes could follow, its way of working off nervous energy.
“We will remain in the Jilbert system until you have secured the asteroid, never fear,” said the admiral. “My fleet is powerful enough to take care of any Hegemony attempt to reinforce Bititu.”
I remembered the way the Tsihn fleet had bolted from Lunga and stranded us.
“In point of fact,” said the admiral, tongue flicking blurrily, “we are hoping that the Hegemony will attempt to interfere. It will give us an opportunity to destroy one of their fleets.”
I was glad to hear that it was so confident. Glancing along our end of the conference table to Frede and my other officers, I saw that none of us humans shared its opinion.
My battalion spent most of the flight in training. We converted the troopship’s passageways and compartments into mock-ups of the tunnels and caves we expected to find on Bititu and practiced storming through heavily defended positions, day after day. There was no room for subtlety in our tactics. It was just brute force and firepower. I knew the casualties would be high.
“Why doesn’t the fleet just blow the goddamned asteroid out of existence?” Frede asked one night in our bunk. “Why do we have to take it?”
I had no answer, except, “Maybe the Commonwealth wants to use it as a base for themselves after we’ve driven out the Hegemony.”
“You know what I think,” she asked, then went on without waiting for my reply, “I think it’s those double-domed scientists. They want Arachnoid specimens to study, so we get stuck with the job of trying to capture some of them.”
“But according to our briefings, the Arachnoids fight to the last one,” I said.
“Tell it to the scientists.”
“Still,” I said, thinking aloud, “the fleet could bombard the asteroid before we go in, pound it as hard as they can. It wouldn’t hurt the Arachnoids deep inside the rock, but it could knock out any of them up by the surface.”
“And make our landing easier,” Frede said.
But when I took up the question with the admiral’s chief aide, a reptilian about my own size with beautiful multicolored scales, the answer was: No preliminary bombardment. It would merely alert the Arachnoid defenders and delay our landing.
“But once we show ourselves in the Jilbert system, several light-hours away from the asteroid, won’t that alert them?” I asked.
“No preliminary bombardment,” the reptilian repeated. “The plan is set and will not be changed.”
I demanded the right to ask the admiral about it. Permission denied. I got the impression that the strategists who had planned this operation wanted to capture Bititu as intact as possible. They were perfectly willing to spend our lives in exchange for killing off the defenders without wrecking the asteroid itself.
I had other ideas.
I assigned Frede and my other officers to studying the pictures of Bititu as minutely as possible. I myself spent most of my nights going over those images, pinpointing each spot on that pitted bare rock that looked like an air-lock hatch or a gun emplacement. Then, one by one, I assigned each of those targets to one of our heavy-weapons platoons.
My plan was to knock out those surface defenses as we rode
toward the asteroid in our landing vehicles. Instead of sitting inside and waiting passively until we touched down on the surface, I ordered my weapons platoons to zero in on specific targets and destroy them while we were in transit from the troopship to the asteroid.
Otherwise, I feared, the Arachnoid defenders would blast our ships out of the sky before we reached the rock.
As we neared the Jilbert system I worked the troopers harder and harder. Little sleep and less rest. We raced through the ship’s passageways every day and almost every night. When we were not physically assaulting our mock targets we were studying the imagery of Bititu, familiarizing ourselves with every crevice and hollow of its surface, picking out the precise spots where each landing vehicle would touch down on its surface.
Some of the troopers began to complain that by the time we reached our target they would be too tired to fight. I drove them harder.
“We go relativistic in six hours,” the Tsihn liaison officer told me at last. “Then two or three hours to the point where you embark for the asteroid.”
I got my troops ready. We marched to the loading docks where our landing vehicles waited, singing ancient songs of battle and blood. We got into our armored space suits, using the buddy system to check each other carefully. The suits had been anodized white at my insistence; in the dimly lit tunnels of Bititu we had to be able to see each other. No one knew what the visual range of the Arachnoids was, whether white stood out as clearly to them as it did to us, but I was determined to avoid killing ourselves with friendly fire.
I put the heavy-weapons platoons in the first of our forty landers, with the other platoons’ landers coming in behind them. I put myself in the first of the weapons platoons.
As the troops clambered aboard the landers, awkward in their heavily armored suits, Frede came up beside me, her helmet visor raised, an odd, expectant smile on her face.
“Well, we’re as ready as we can be,” she said, her voice trembling ever so slightly.
“Make certain your weapons team hits every assigned target,” I said. “Especially the air locks. Maybe those spiders can breathe vacuum, but I doubt it.”
“I never liked spiders,” she said.
“Now’s your chance to kill a few thousand of them.”
She nodded inside the space helmet, then slid the visor down and lumbered off to her landing vehicle. I clamped my visor and sealed it. I had done everything I could think of. Now it was us against them, with no mercy expected either way.
The landing vehicles were little more than armored shields with handgrips for the troops and propulsion units hung off their sterns. We pushed off the troopship, forty landers, and slid out into the darkness of space.
“Here we go,” said one of the troopers. I heard his tense, shaky voice through my helmet earphones.
“Another free ride, courtesy of the army.”
“Enjoy your trip.”
“Yeah. You gotta be born to it.”
No one laughed.
The sullen red star off in the distance gave very little light. The dark, pitted rock of Bititu seemed to float out there among the stars, a long way off. And we seemed to be hanging in the middle of the emptiness, barely moving. As I clung to the handgrips behind the forward armored shield, in the midst of the heavy-weapons platoon, I had to turn my entire body around to see the troopship we had just left. Farther in the distance hovered hundreds of battle cruisers and dreadnoughts, sleek and deadly, with enough firepower to atomize Bititu and its fanatical defenders.
We slowly, agonizingly drifted toward the asteroid. I felt naked and alone despite my armored space suit and the soldiers surrounding me. Not a sign of life from the asteroid. Not a glimmer of light. It merely hung there, growing slightly larger as we slowly approached it, a massive elongated chunk of rock, pockmarked with craters and scored with strange grooves, dark and solid and ominous.
I checked the watch set into the wrist of my suit. I had set it to count down to the instant when we would begin firing at the surface facilities. A hundred and nine seconds to go. A hundred and nine eternities.
At last I saw something glint on the asteroid’s surface. The reflection of sunlight? No, Jilbert was too faint and red to make that kind of glitter. Then another, and the front shield of one of our landers flared with the impact of a laser blast. Missiles were leaping from hidden fissures in the asteroid, blazing toward us. Our bombardment plan was instantly forgotten as we began to shoot at the missiles. They exploded in silent fireballs, each one closer to us as we drove onward toward the asteroid.
A lander was hit, bodies and fragments scattering, tumbling, flailing through the dark emptiness. Another, and then another. Dying voices screamed in my earphones.
“Fire at the surface targets!” I bellowed into my helmet microphone. “Heavy weapons, fire at the surface. All other platoons, antimissile fire.”
My well-trained troops began shooting at the targets we had picked out. But the enemy was firing missiles from spots that had looked like nothing but bare rock until a few moments earlier. A missile exploded scant meters from my lander, I could feel the heat of its flare even through the armor of my space suit. Fragments ripped into us, clunking against our armored suits. A trooper’s oxygen tank exploded in a brief deadly flare of flame, killing him instantly.
We were hitting the ground targets, I could see. Explosions peppered Bititu’s surface. Missiles were still blazing toward us, several more landers were blown away, but we were hurtling toward the surface now. We would be there in a few seconds. Smaller weapons were blasting at us now; I could feel the lander shuddering as small solid slugs racked us. A trooper was hit just next to me, space suit erupting into fountains of gushing blood that froze in the vacuum into solid red pellets.
We huddled behind the lander’s forward shield as lasers and projectiles racked the vehicle from one end to the other. Half the troops on the lander had already been killed by the time we thudded onto the asteroid’s rocky surface.
I jumped in the negligible gravity, rifle in hand, and blasted a partially open hatch set into the rock. It snapped shut. It took an effort to keep from soaring into space; I adjusted the flight pack on my back to negative and felt some semblance of weight that helped me to flatten onto my belly while laser beams and volleys of slugs zipped over my head.
My earphones were ablaze with frantic voices:
“They’re all around us!”
“I’ve got seventy-percent casualties! We’ve got to get off this rock!”
“Where’s the weapons platoon? I need backup. Now! ”
I slapped a magnetic grenade on the hatch and backed away. It blew noiselessly in the vacuum, smoke dissipating almost before my eyes registered its presence.
“Get into the tunnels!” I yelled into my helmet mike. “The only troops left on the surface are going to be the dead. Get inside! Move!”
I rolled another grenade into the opening of the blasted hatch, then slid into the tunnel headfirst, spraying rifle fire into the murky shadows to clear out any defenders who might have survived the grenade.
The tunnel was barely wide enough for me to crawl through and so dark that I had to turn on my helmet light, despite the infrared sensors in my visor. I heard something slithering behind me and rolled onto my back, aiming my rifle down the length of my torso.
“It’s just me, sir!” came a trooper’s voice, and I saw a space-suited figure, as anonymous as a faceless sculpture, crawling down the tunnel behind me.
Rolling onto my stomach again, I came face-to-face with my first Arachnoid. It was black, fully a meter wide, with eight spindly legs covered with what seemed like barbs. It held an oblong object in its front two claws, something with fins and a glasslike lens pointing at me. Behind that weapon I saw a face with horizontal mandibles clicking rapidly and eight glittering eyes, no two the same size.
I ducked my head, digging my visor into the bare rock of the tunnel, and pulled the trigger of my rifle at the same time. I felt a blast
of heat against the armored top of my helmet, heard a high-pitched wail and the scuttling sound of claws on rock.
When I looked up the spider was gone, but there was a patch of sticky pus-yellow goo on the tunnel floor where it had stood. I saw a side tunnel veering off from this one. Pulling a rocket grenade loose from my belt, I set it for impact and fired it down the side tunnel. It exploded almost immediately, showering me with a hail of pebbles and dust and smoke.
I crawled past the side tunnel, ordering the trooper behind me to take his buddies along it. My earphones blazed with frantic voices:
“There’s millions of ’em!”
“They’re behind us! They’re all around us!”
“We’ve gotta get out of here! There’s too many of ’em!”
There was no way out of here. We could not get back aboard the landers even if we wanted to; they had lifted off the asteroid as soon as we had disembarked.
Slithering forward on my belly, I peered deeper into the tunnel. For a few moments I saw nothing, but I realized I could hear scraping noises and eerie, whistling screeches. Somehow there was enough air in the tunnel to carry sound, or maybe the rock itself was conducting sound waves. Farther off, I could hear the crack, crack sound of lasers firing so rapidly that it became an almost continuous clatter of noise. And explosions, some of them big enough to shake the tunnel. Dust and screams and voices shouting.
“There’s more of ’em!”
“It’s like a trapdoor. Look out!”
The tunnel was widening. The light on my helmet was deep red, not much help in seeing, but Intelligence hoped that the Arachnoids’ eyes could not see that end of the visible spectrum. It occurred to me that if we could produce sensors that detected wavelengths our eyes could not see, the Arachnoids might similarly have developed technology to aid their natural senses. So I switched off the lamp and inched along the black tunnel, depending on my visor’s infrared sensors to warn me.