Battlestations

by S. M. Stirling

  But how the hell was he going to report to his human handler about the bug fucking and what it mean to humanity, if those eggs hatched knowing as much about slugs—about humans—as Greel now knew?

  Shit, what a mess.

  Well, never mind. You can’t explain what you can’t explain. Nobody up on the ships was going to want to think about what would happen if the next generation of bugs hatched. The mission was to make certain that the next generation didn’t hatch.

  And never mind the bit about bug dinner parties with bug officers as the main course.

  Well, promotions were always hard-won, in any man’s army.

  You had to do the best you could.

  When Dresser got back to his human body he was going to parlay this mission into a couple pay-grades worth of special expertise.

  Especially since the next generation of bug babies all had him as a father. Sort of.

  No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t imagine how the hell he was going to get any of what had happened to him into a cogent report.

  Luckily, his new status as Top Bug for this installation made him the last word in security for the area.

  So he could probably make sure personally that none of those bug babies of his ever grew up to eat any of the teddy-bear natives of this planet. It was a nice planet once, before the bug infestation.

  It could be a nice planet again. Would be a nice planet again.

  Thanks to his bug girlfriend’s decision not to eat him alive.

  Jesus, how had he gotten into this?

  And, more to the point, what kind of report could he give that would get him extracted, soonest?

  Maybe he could say that ReScree might change her mind and eat him. If he got eaten, whoever chowed down on him would know everything he knew.

  Talk about ways to blow a mission.

  But nobody would believe him when he told them they’d better get him out of here because his very death could give—and every secret human capability and plan as well. They’d think he was making it up, grasping at straws, manufacturing excuses.

  They’d think Dresser had lost his nerve.

  Death was real different for slugs—for humans.

  Maybe he was taking the wrong approach.

  Maybe the new equipment he had with him would help. Command would want to examine all this stuff: the jeep, the weapons, the command and control hardware.

  You couldn’t really make much of it without his bug sensibilities.

  Maybe he’d give a technical report, along with a request that he and this gear be extracted together so he could show them how it worked, back home.

  On that ship. Not home. “Home” was bug-think. The bugs couldn’t go home, once they’d left a place. They made one interspatial journey, one landfall, and that was it. They had to make a home wherever they ended up. Must be a lot of bug colonization ships that never found a landfall as good as this one. When that happened, they just ate each other and fucked their brains out until they all died of lack of life support.

  So was the history of the people. So was the fortune of the Hundredth Mother and her Unit, to have found such a fertile, food-bearing home.

  Here they’d stay until a new generation could be launched to the stars from this home. . . .

  Dresser shook his head so hard in his helmet that his wounded antenna twinged.

  Shit, this bug-think had to be controlled. He had to find a way to control it. Otherwise, Greel would come awake and then there’d be trouble.

  Let the bugger sleep.

  Ha.

  But it wasn’t funny. He couldn’t do this mission without the bug expertise that came with this body. Had they known, back on the Stephen Hawking, that the body would come with an inboard intelligence as well as with operating instructions? Known and not bothered to tell him?

  Or was Dresser just the luckiest sonofabitch this side of Scout Boat 781, his old command?

  Whatever the truth, Dresser wanted to be extracted, and fast. He could give them more relevant data than they’d ever dreamed he’d find out.

  Troop strength. Site reports. Logistics. Battle plans. Long-term strategy. Doctrine. Order of battle.

  You name it, Greel knew it.

  And there was no use wasting all this critical intel dithering around on a standard infiltration mission. . . .

  Jesus, they hadn’t known squat, shipboard.

  The realization broke over Dresser so suddenly he almost veered off the road and hit a tree. If they’d known what he knew, up there, they’d never have sent him down here in the first place.

  They’d have kept this Greel body up there and interrogated it until it died of stress or its own will.

  But they didn’t know anything about the people. They hadn’t known anything about Greel.

  They couldn’t have known. Dresser started the jeep again: rest right rear foot on pedal. Push down on button with right front foot. Stomp bar’s left side with left front foot. Pump with left rear foot until angle relative to ground is achieved. . . . Piece of cake.

  They couldn’t have known, up on the ship, what kind of bug body they had. They didn’t know a section leader from an orderly. They still didn’t know what it meant to have your infiltrator become an agent of influence.

  Shit, if they knew, maybe they wouldn’t let him come in, after all.

  Maybe they’d keep him down here, hardware or no hardware. He could read the compass directions of the bug world, now, and translate them into his own with hardly a second thought. He’d better figure this out, fast. He was almost at the coordinates where the communicator was secreted, and he didn’t want to draw attention to the site by spending too long there.

  If the real advantage in this war is understanding the enemy power source and technology, so that we can counter the enemy’s weapons, then they’ll let me come in.

  If they decide the advantage is in understanding enemy psychology and having an ear in the planning meetings, then I’m stuck here for the duration.

  Dresser really wanted to be able to make a case for the former. It was human-think to expect to learn about bug tactics and throw a monkey wrench into enemy strategy by infiltrating the bugs’ planning sessions.

  The enemy’s senior war planners were mostly dead and living in the backbrains of their descendants, anyhow.

  You couldn’t really skew the family’s thinking. The people had no choice but to stay here, to live here and die here. They couldn’t retreat. They had no way off the planet once they’d made landfall. They’d cannibalized their interstellar vehicles to make the systems they used to chew up these planets.

  They’d stay here until there were enough young bugs to do the work, and then they’d start rebuilding a spacefaring capability, using up the planetary resources to fuel the expansion.

  When they were done, the new generation would be starborne, thousands upon thousands of them. But the cycle was nowhere near that stage.

  They were digging in, still in colonization stage. And so you had to eradicate them. . . .

  Dresser started to feel sick. The dreaded psychic undertow began tugging at him. He could barely see. Barely control his limbs.

  Don’t be scared, Greel. Go back to sleep. Everything’s fine.

  He let memories wash over him of vast clouds of colony ships leaving a used-up world. He stopped the jeep as the memories overwhelmed real-time stimuli. He put his head on his arm and concentrated on maintaining control.

  Take command. Take control.

  When the memories subsided, he resumed driving toward his contact coordinates.

  Ol’ Greel had the clout to come out here, alone, with all the newest bug hardware. It was a lot easier to control the bug body when it wasn’t afraid. Originally, it had been naked, afraid that some snake or anteater or teddy bear would come out of the jungle and eat it.

  The bugs were real picky about how they died.

  Now that he had to frame his report, he needed to be very careful not to make Greel afraid t
hat he’d eradicate Greel’s offspring—their offspring. Dresser began trying to feel parental about the eggs.

  It wasn’t easy. He wasn’t the guy for this part of the mission. They should have used a psychologist. Or a xenobiologist. He was just a soldier. A shooter.

  But maybe that was what he and the bug had in common. This bug, no matter how high he’d come in his hierarchy, was still a soldier.

  And the trouble with cohabiting a body with another soldier was that soldiers were tough, disciplined, and resourceful.

  They knew that some things were worth the ultimate sacrifice.

  Dresser had one advantage over the bug body and its innate intelligence: he didn’t give a damn how he died. He didn’t care about the disposition of this carcass, or any carcass he might end up inhabiting, including his own.

  Dead was dead, to Dresser.

  So when he got to the contact point, he didn’t flap because he couldn’t find the APOT transceiver right away. He wanted to give his report, you bet.

  But if he couldn’t, he was willing to wait and try again. Or kill himself and his bug body if he thought that was the only way to protect what he’d already gained on this mission.

  And he’d gained plenty, he thought, rummaging around in the undergrowth for the transceiver. But maybe not enough to die for. He just needed to keep the bug body under control by letting it know that he’d kill it where nobody would ever find it, if it gave him any shit while he was trying to make his report. Kill it where nobody’d ever find it to eat it. Kill it where everything it knew would die with it. Forever.

  It didn’t want to die alone.

  He sympathized with it, but not enough to be afraid to crawl around on the ground. The bug body was having its equivalent of the heebie-jeebies, down on all sixes in the bush: it had a hereditary fear of spiders, snakes, and most furred mammals.

  Even in its suit, it was beginning to drool a brown fluid from its anus: when it was this tired, it couldn’t control its bowels if it was afraid.

  You had to ignore the stuff you couldn’t control.

  You just kept your mission in your mind. You just kept doing the job.

  Eventually, you were supposed to win that way.

  Only sometimes, you didn’t.

  Where was the damned communicator, anyhow?

  When he found it, he was nearly weak with relief.

  It had an inboard autotranslator, thank God.

  He sat there in the grass and burst out the first identifying transmission.

  It seemed to take forever to get a response from the Hawking.

  When he got it, it made him want to cry.

  Nobody was buying his story.

  “But I’m telling you, you ought to extract me and this bug buggy I got here. I got weapons. I got intel. I got everything you need.”

  “No way,” came the response. “Not if what you say about your infiltration is true.”

  What had he said? He didn’t remember saying anything.

  “What do you mean?” he chattered in bug speak, and the machine translated.

  Had he blanked out? What the hell had he said?

  “Confirm,” said the voice from his ship, “that you’re group leader of the Hundredth Unit, that you’re in the planning sessions, that you’re able to call strikes and plan incursions and determine force mix.”

  “Confirmed,” he admitted. He hadn’t meant to tell them so much. He remembered now what he’d said. But he’d been light-headed when he’d said it, giddy with contact, trying to make them see reason. . . . He’d just been trying to explain why they ought to bring him in. Bring him back aboard ship.

  Bring him. . . .

  “You just get next to that big female and stay there,” the voice told him. “We don’t want to rock the boat. Keep up the good work. Hawking, out.”

  All he could hear was static.

  He wanted to cry, but these eyes couldn’t. He wanted to laugh, but he had no lips.

  The alien body was already up off the ground, heading back toward the safety of its jeep.

  He was hopping up into it before he realized that he was singing a soft, happy song of parenthood, of home, and hearth, and children.

  BATTLESTATION: VANGUARD

  Dedicated with thanks to

  Jim Baen

  who used to work with the Fleet

  and our newest crewperson, Katherine.

  PROLOGUE

  by Bill Fawcett

  Fleet battlestation Stephen Hawking had been in action close to three years, fighting a lonely battle against the predatory Ichtons. It had lost nearly half the warships assigned to it—destroyed or too badly damaged to carry on the fight. Morale had taken a severe blow right at the start, when the battlestation had arrived only a few weeks too late to prevent the annihilation of one of the races they were supporting. Then, the allies’ defeat in the Battle of Gerson, and the subsequent loss of the Gerson home world, had shown them just how overwhelming the task ahead of Hawking was.

  Fleeing from Gerson and gathering her resources, the Hawking prowled between the stars, avoiding contact with the major Ichton fleets. The damage inflicted in the Battle of Gerson had made it clear to everyone on board just how vulnerable their position was at the far end of a supply line two hundred thousand light-years long. While the Fleet personnel had volunteered for the mission of saving the three worlds of the races whose representatives had traveled so far to ask for help, not everyone shared their sense of dedication to the mission. Even the surviving races in the Core preferred to spend their limited resources defending their own planets, rather than rallying around the battlestation.

  Likewise, many of the merchants whose companies had subsidized the building of the Hawking were preparing reports recommending that they cut their losses. In practice, this meant abandoning the battlestation and fleeing for safety, even though the journey to the nearest Alliance world, three months away at top speed, was nearly as risky as staying to face the Ichtons. Already a few of the more timid Indie merchant ships had been gone suspiciously long without returning for fuel or repairs. It was a toss-up whether they had fallen prey to the enemy, or were burning up the parsecs in a headlong flight back to the Alliance.

  The survivors manning the Hawking had good reason to feel vulnerable. Skirmishing with the Ichtons went on constantly. The buglike enemy had come close to destroying the Hawking once already. None of the promised reinforcements had appeared; they could be months away, if indeed the notoriously stingy Alliance Senate hadn’t already decided to withdraw support from an apparently failing campaign so far from home.

  With morale so low, it was no surprise that a few of those who had been attracted to the mission by the promise of quick riches turned elsewhere in hopes of guaranteeing their own survival.

  DEADFALL

  by Scott MacMillan

  “Payday,” Harvey grumbled to himself. “You line up for almost a half hour, then you stick your pay card in a slot in the wall, and guess what?” He pressed a button marked “Adjust” to the right of the small screen. “After this thing gets through deducting what you’ve spent, you’re lucky if you’ve got enough credits left for a six-pack.”

  The small screen went blank for a moment, then flashed Harvey’s ID on the screen.

  Kimmelman, Harvey John.

  Harvey pressed the button marked “Yes.”

  Enter personal identification number.

  Harvey tapped in his six-digit number, waited a few seconds, and pressed the button marked “Enter.”

  One Moment Please.

  Although the liquid circuitry of the machine rendered it totally silent, Harvey liked to imagine that from somewhere behind the polished stainless-steel walls he could hear the whir and click of small gears meshing in engagement as the central banking and finance computer debited his Earned Credits Account.

  Kimmelman, Harvey John. The screen seemed to darken slightly as if it were scowling at some sort of economic male-factor.

  ECA audit s
hows significant deficit.

  “Great,” Harvey snorted. “Just great.”

  Pay card restricted to essential purchases only for next 24 pay periods.

  Twenty-four pay periods . . . “Jeez,” Harvey groaned, “that can’t be right.”

  “Got a problem, amigo?” The man in the dark blue boiler suit standing behind Harvey sounded mildly concerned.

  “I’ll say I’ve got a problem,” Harvey answered. “This machine is all screwed up. It says I’m two years over my credit limit.”

  “Well, are you?” the man asked.

  “Hell, no. I couldn’t be more than maybe two or three days over at the most.” Harvey scowled at the small screen.

  Please remove your card.

  “You haven’t loaned anybody your card, have you?” the man asked.

  “No,” Harvey lied. “I haven’t.” Except for that bimbo up on Dark Green Ten, he thought. If she . . .

  “Well then, it’s probably this pay station,” the man in the boiler suit said, derailing Harvey’s train of thought. “All kinds of crap contaminating the circuitry down here in Violet One and Two.” He put his own card in the machine and tapped in his code as he spoke. “Look,” he said, pointing to the screen. “The damn thing shows me having way more pay credits than I should.”

  “That’s great for you,” Harvey said. “But I’m still busted until I can get up to Twelve deck next month and sort this out with someone in Finance.”

  The man in the boiler suit gave Harvey a wicked grin. “How much you need to hold you over till then?”

  “Huh?” Harvey asked, a little slow on the uptake.

  “Look. I’ve got more than enough ‘extra’ pay credits here to cover anything I’ll need for the next month. So why don’t I just transfer some of them into your Additional Credit Account? You can then transfer them to some of the clubs on Dark Green Ten and enjoy yourself next time you’re heading up north.” He gestured toward the overhead deck with his index finger. “Come on”—he gave Harvey a conspiratorial grin—“my treat.”