“Nicole, we must code twenty the command.”
Code twenty: destroy all classified documents and pieces of military equipment. Two hours into the battle and the garrison was throwing in the towel-preparing for total defeat.
Two lousy hours into the battle.
She was still wearing her gown. It was indecent. Considering the number of lives, the amount of time, the amount of money and effort invested, it seemed to be against some higher law for all of that to be written off two hours into the fight.
A major battle-the subjugation of an entire planet-should take more time.
More time.
Nkruma had looked down at his hands. two brown-black knots upon the chaos of papers covering his desk.
“I have already told General Katsuzo. He… he told me that I was lying!”
Nicole had reached out her hand and placed it upon Nkruma’s shoulder. “I’ll take care of the code twenty. Colonel.”
Nkruma clasped his hands, closed his eyes, and spoke in a deathly quiet voice.
“What do the Dracs have up there? What in the hell do they have up there?”
She gently shook his shoulder. “I’ve sent the performance reports off to sector intelligence. We might catch it, but sector will come up with new tactics. The next time the Dracs hit a base-”
Nkruma shrugged her hand away and looked up at her with terror-filled eyes; he spoke with a voice choked with shame-humiliation.
“They’re sweeping the entire defense command aside as though… as though we are nothing!”
He lowered his head until his forehead rested upon his clasped hands. “Nothing!” His head rocked back-and-forth upon his hands.
“Do they read minds? Do the bloody yellow devils read minds?”
Nicole had left the office, issued the orders, then returned to her own section to begin erasing the records. Captain Ted Makai, tactical officer for the Storm Mountain complex, still in his formal whites, sat in the intelligence center, a glass of champagne in his hand. He raised his head as she entered.
“Happy days, Joanne.”
“How much have you had to drink?”
“Not nearly enough.”
“Aren’t you needed someplace? There’s a bit of a war going on outside.”
“That explains the noise.” He inhaled sharply. “No, I’m not needed anymore. All the damage I can do is already done. It’s up to the computers, now.” She walked around him and began setting up the sequence to dump the memory cores. “Joanne, a century ago this would have been called a complete rout.” He finished his champagne in one gulp and let his glass fall to the floor. “But there just isn’t any place to rout to.”
“I’d love to sit and hold your hand, Ted, but I’m busy.”
“Busy, busy, busy.”
Makai stood, put his hands into his pockets, and began singing “Johnny Zero” as he walked through the door into the corridor:
“Sergeant,” asked the old man,
“I’ve come to See my son.”
“There,” said the sergeant,
“There he lies across his gun.”
“Across his gun, you say?
Then Johnny stood his ground?”
“He stood there like a rock
until they cut him down.”
The old man left, his John
part of the battle won.
“Yes,” said the sergeant,
“John was too damned dumb to run.”
Chicken, chicken, chicken;
Hoorah for Johnny Zero!
He wasn’t worth a shit alive;
but dead he is a hero…
The deep whine of an enemy assault craft…
Joanne Nicole opened her eyes and looked again at the approaching Drac lander. Erasing the records had been such,a waste of time. When the Dracs attacked the Storm Mountain command complex, the memory cores had been destroyed.
Everything had been destroyed.
Almost everyone had been destroyed.
She never did see Ted Makai again.
By unspoken agreement, the survivors decided to meet the Dracs above ground, and had joined the mud soldiers on the surface. Code clerks, cooks, boot-polishers, technicians, programmers, operators, staff officers, and paper wizards moved into the sarcasm of a front line the infantry was trying to establish.
At first there were fewer weapons than there were hands to fire and serve them. In an hour the numbers bad balanced. In another hour they had five times as many weapons as they needed. The line never was established.
Now that the Dracs had withdrawn, there was nothing left but the bodies, the mud, and forty-odd sets of eyes staring blankly at the approach of the enemy ship.
Eyes.
Nicole recognized those eyes from the faces of hundreds of thousands of defeated soldiers-in intelligence training, pictures of forgotten soldiers in forgotten places: Andersonville, the Ardennes, Spain, Stalingrad, Bataan, Okinawa, Bastogne, Korea, Vietnam, the Sinai, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Acadia, Capetown, Planet Dacha, Planet Baalphor, Chadduk Station…
The uniforms differed, the faces-human, Shikazu, Drac-differed. It was the eyes. The eyes were always the same: the glazed, stunned, defeated stare of a cornered, confused, exhausted animal that had lost its will to resist, its will to live.
The Drac lander hovered at the foot of the mountain for a moment, then slowly reduced its altitude until it came to a steaming halt upon the mud flats below.
She thought of the tapes she, had seen of the interrogations of the seven Dracs captured at the battle of Chadduk Station.
Their uniforms were filth-covered red; Tsien Denvedah, the Drac infantry elite. They did not look so damned elite as they slumped before the interrogation officer.
The hands had only three fingers each; the heads and faces were devoid of hair, the deep yellow skin smooth. The noses were little more than openings in upper lips. Foreheads sloped back, chins receded, yellow eyes stared blankly from beneath prominent brows.
All intelligence officers had learned the rudiments of the Drac language, and the interrogator in the tape had explained to the Drac before him how hopeless its position was. Things could be made easier if the Drac would cooperate.
A three-fingered hand rose and was placed against the Drac soldier’s breast. It clutched something hanging beneath its uniform. The human interrogator walked over, slapped the Drac’s hand away from its breast, then reached his hand inside the uniform. The human’s hand withdrew holding a small golden cube attached to a golden chain that hung around the Drac’s neck.
“What is this?”
“It is my line’s Talman.”
Talman. The bible of the Talmani. The human tightened his hand around the golden cube.
“What would you do if I snapped this chain and threw this luck-charm away, maphrofag? Hey, Dragger?”
The Drac stared for a moment at the human’s fist, then it closed its eyes.
“I would have to go to the expense of buying another.”
The fist drew quickly away from the Drac, breaking the chain. The human studied the Drac as though he expected the alien to tum into a gibbering column of jelly at the removal of its Talman.
The Drac opened its eyes and stared blankly at the floor. The interrogator dangled the broken chain in front of the Drac’s face.
“Here it is, you two-sexed shit! If you do not cooperate, I will throw it away.”
Slowly the Drac’s gaze lifted from the floor until it was looking into the eyes of the interrogator. The Drac’s eyes filled with glitter, then its mouth formed into a grin, exposed the solid white mandibles that served as teeth.
“So, humans are as stupid as they appear. I am encouraged.”
The interrogator stuffed the cube and chain into his pocket.
“Dracs are the prisoners here; not humans.”
“It is not the first battle, human, but the last that decides such matters. You have just told me that the Dracon Chamber will win the last battle.”
&nbs
p; The interrogation had gone on for much longer, but Joanne Nicole’s head was filled with the conviction in the Drac’s words. That and the look in the creature’s eyes.
The will to fight, to live, had returned.
As the lower bay doors on the Drac lander opened, she wondered how she would appear to the Drac intelligence service. How she would appear to herself.
She reached into her sleeve pocket and felt for the tiny pronide capsule. Once her fingers had found it, she pulled the capsule from her pocket and studied it. Half pink, half blue, it carried the colors of innocent childhood.
Nkruma had been in the throes of a hysterical calm. He was issuing the death drops in fistfulls to everyone who would take them. As he handed a capsule to her, she shouted to him.
“Nkruma, what do you think you’re doing?”
“All of us know things that the Dracs want to know. Duty will tell you what to do.”
Duty? The USE Force knew about Catvishnu falling. Before the battle was over, USEF computers would change codes, tactics, equipment, priorities, and anything else that depended upon the knowledge of any person or group of persons.
The USEF assumed that everyone would be captured alive, and that everyone would talk their heads off. Experience makes pragmatists out of us all. It also removed the need for mass suicide.
Nicole had held the capsule in front of Nkruma’s face.
“What are you, Nkruma? Some kind of Jonestown-Masada freak? Die rather than have the courage to face defeat?”
She watched in horror as he stuck the capsule into his mouth, crushed it with his teeth. and swallowed. After a weak cry, he was dead. Many of those with capsules died with him.
She watched a human in strange blue robes emerge from the lander’s bay. He paused at the foot of the ramp and looked up at the remains of the Storm Mountain Irregulars. He studied the faces for a moment, turned to speak to someone within the bay, then turned again and began slogging through the mud toward the ragged assembly.
Joanne Nicole watched him. His concentration appeared to be centered on his footing, his robe held up out of the mud’s reach.
She looked down at the capsule.
Pain.
Training had covered pain; the kind of pain made to endure until the sufferer began jabbering-saying anything-to make the pain stop. It had lent a sense of drama to an occupation that was essentially nothing more than filling out reports, sifting bits of information, solving puzzles, and using the known points of a graph to try to predict the unknown points.
Intelligence personnel were “back yard” soldiers; pain was for those filling out the front lines. Intelligence was a job like any civilian job. But there was some disagreement.
That sergeant in intelligence recruit training:
“It don’t make a damn bit of difference what your job is, Nicole. If you’re in the Force, your assbottom-line occupation is to sit in the mud behind a rifle and kill the enemy. First you’re infantry. You get to do something else only when the infantry doesn’t need you.”
Puzzles.
She had always been good at puzzles. And statistical analysis and languages were nothing more than puzzles. And the peacetime Force offered puzzles with real challenges to them: alien languages, devising and breaking sophisticated codes, devising strategies to counter alien tactics.
It was supposed to be a clean-collar, predictable, desk job; that’s what it had been for nine years. Then, in 2072, the second year into the war with the Dracon Chamber, Joanne Nicole found herself sitting in the mud, behind a rifle, killing Dracs.
The training sergeant had been right.
Damn him to hell.
Sit in the mud, sight through the rain and drizzle down that weapon, and fry anything yellow. No puzzles there; just primitive survival.
The human in the blue robes came to the first of the soldiers, bent down, and talked to him. The soldier pointed listlessly back up the slope. Joanne Nicole studied the man as she held the capsule between her thumb and forefinger and licked the end of the capsule with the tip of her tongue.
The human slogged up the rise and stopped three meters away. The gold glitter of his Talman peeked from between the folds in his robe. He spoke in English.
“We are here to pick up those who surrendered.” He seemed to be in his late forties-greying hair above a dark brown face lined with years.
Nicole lowered her hand and looked into the human’s eyes. “What’s it going for these days?”
He looked confused. “What’s what going for?”
“Treason.”
The man laughed. His laugh was the infectious variety born from genuine mirth. Several of the whipped soldiers around him also laughed, not really knowing why. The human shook his head. “Are you the commanding officer?”
“Yes.”
“Your name, please?”
“Nicole. Major Joanne Nicole.”
“I am called Leonid Mitzak. Major, please ask your charges to enter the lander. Time is precious.”
“What if I don’t? What if they don’t go?”
“I was led to understand that this unit has surrendered. Isn’t this true?”
“If it isn’t?”
“Does this game amuse you, Major?” Mitzak looked around at the faces, then back at Nicole. “The fight will continue, if that is what you prefer. If you have surrendered, then have your men move into the lander.”
She pushed herself to her feet. “Where are the Drac guards?”
“If you have surrendered, there is no need for guards.” He looked again at the soldiers, then back at her. “Is there?”
She dropped the pill into the mud and let her hand fall to her side. “No. There’s no need for guards.”
She began stumbling downhill toward the lander. One-by-one the soldiers in the mud stood and followed her. There were no wounded. The wounded had all taken the death drops rather than be taken alive to face the unknown. Everyone had heard about the tortures dished out by the terrorist Drac Mavedah on the planet Amadeen. For the same reason, many of the still healthy ones took the drops.
The war had killed millions of Dracs and millions of humans; and every human knew what he would do to a Drac given the opportunity. Pain. Endless, excruciating pain. And pronide brought on the ultimate anesthetic.
Nicole paused as she came to the foot of the lander’s ramp. There was a red-uniformed Drac standing in the dark of the bay’s door. The Drac waved its hand.
“Hasu. Benga va nu! Hasu, dutshaat kizlode!” Get in. You hurry up! Get in, half-sexed excrement-head!
And the excrement referred to was kiz; an animal native to the planet Draco that was so foul that both the species and the species’ waste product carried the same name.
Several obscene retorts in Drac came to Joanne Nicole’s mind, but she resisted the temptation to reply in kind. Instead, she moved up the ramp and entered the lander. When everyone had settled on the deck, the bay doors closed, leaving the compartment in deep shadows cast by the lone light above the door to the craft’s bridge.
The human, Mitzak, and the Drac went through the door to the bridge, leaving the defeated soldiers alone. There was a quiet hum and Joanne Nicole felt the lander leave the soil of Catvishnu.
TWO
The first given is existence; its fact, not its form, nor its manner of change, nor the purposes ascribed to its aspects by its creatures.
The Talman
The Story of Shizumaat. Koda Nuvida
Joanne Nicole awakened from a dreamless sleep to find her gaze fixed on the compartment’s single light: trying to find some warmth, strength, in its feeble glow. She turned her head and saw that all the prisoners were buried in sleep or thoughts of their own.
All silent.
On some vague intellectual level they knew that somewhere out there the USE Force was creaming the hell out of some Drac command. Somewhere out there, the war was still far from decided: But in the total of the universe they could see, their universe, their guts all said th
e same thing: whipped. Defeated.
The compartment light was picked up and reflected by another set of eyes; eyes that were no longer defeated, but, instead, burned with hate. The eyes belonged to Sergeant Benbo.
Nicole settled back and watched him her eyelids barely open.
…She had just pulled her gown over her head, her lungs aching from the dust and smoke that filled the lower levels of the complex. A dark shadow filled the doorway to her quarters.
“Are you Major Nicole?”
In between coughs, she answered. “Yes.”
“Then get your titties covered up, Major. You’re in command.”
“Me?”
“You’re all that’s left, lady. Everybody else is dead.” Benbo had tossed an object at her, and she caught it as it rebounded from her breast. It was a rifle. “Head for the east face surface, Major. Bring that with you; I’ll find another.”
The sergeant disappeared into the smoke.
When she drew her right hand away from the weapon, she saw that blood covered the rough surface of the front hand-grip…
Nicole looked away from Benbo’s frightening silence and closed her eyes as exhaustion again pulled at her. Storm Mountain gnawed at her sleep.
…Sergeant Benbo. With curses, kicks, punches, and screams he had intimidated his collection of paper wizards and electron collators into becoming infantry soldiers in what must have been history’s briefest course in basic training.
…The noise-the sizzle of enemy weapons, the soldier screaming into the hiss of his radio, the others screaming in anger, the few screaming in pain, her own voice shouting orders-sound assaulting her eardrums from both inside and out…
…She couldn’t see whether the mud-covered creature cowering at the bottom of the trench was male or female. Its eyes were wide with terror.
Benbo slapped its face again and again.
“Get up! Get up on that line, goddamn you, and fire that weapon! Get up on that line, you chicken yellow sonofabitch, or I’ll slit you open and hang you by your own bleeding guts!”
A gleaming blade leaped into the sergeant’s hand and the soldier’s hand flapped in the mud until it found a rifle. Twice the rifle fired as the soldier tried to kill Benbo. The sergeant pulled the creature to its feet and flung it against the side of the trench, facing the advancing enemy.
Enemy Papers Page 20