by John Dalmas
At any rate she was right: Tagus was beautiful. Colonized worlds invariably were; it went with being Terra-like. At the moment, what dominated his view of Tagus was the world ocean-a vivid blue with white cyclonic swirls. The equatorial zone showed a modest continent whose predominant blue-green suggested heavy forest.
After perhaps ten seconds of planet gazing, Stoorvol called up his instrument display, checking for technical electronic activity. He found plenty, from a single south-coast locale. Two other sources appeared that the scout's shipsmind identified as surveillance buoys parked above the equator at an altitude of 4,600 miles. He marked their locations with icons, but just now his primary interest was the surface location. Centering it on his screen, he magnified the site. It was nearly rectangular, a six by eight-mile area cleared of forest-distinct enough to be measured by his scanner from 170,000 miles out. He marked it with another icon.
"That's probably the colony," he said. "Or one of them. We'll have to check the other hemisphere, but except for size, this one fits Morgan's site description. It's equatorial and on a south-coast headland-an open block with forest on two sides, the ocean on a third, and an inlet on the fourth."
Olavsdottir nodded. "It's hard to imagine a natural opening looking like that."
Stoorvol held the scout where it was, and they kept alternate, one-hour watches. Whoever wasn't on watch used the main cabin to nap, snack, exercise, or otherwise break the monotony. The scout's shipsmind didn't experience time in the same way humans do, and it also had external tasks. It assigned an arbitrary meridian to Tagus, bisecting the visible Wyzhnyny settlement. With that and the equator as references, it mapped the gravitic matrix and what could be seen of the surface-topographic and water features, broad vegetation types-along with much that didn't show on the surface, including gravitic and magnetic gradients and anomalies.
And recorded the frequency bands of Wyzhnyny radio traffic.
The humans, on the other hand, had no duties except to watch the sensor display and the planet itself. It was an invitation to drowse, so an alarm had been provided. The watch wore a communications earpiece, and when anything broke the slow and regular unfolding of the sensor pickups, an alarm ruptured any doze or inattention.
To ease the monotony, Alfhild Olavsdottir recited, in a quiet voice, extensively from the Icelandic sogur-the sagas. More than any other Europeans, even the Finns, the Icelanders had retained their old language as the primary domestic, social, and cultural idiom. Terran was their language of science, business, and the world at large. As for daydreaming-Olavsdottir could be an enthusiastic, even a formidable lover, but she seldom fantasized sex. Except occasionally to compose erotic poetry about some lover in her past. But she did not do that here.
On his watches, Stoorvol's thoughts included women, Alfhild Olavsdottir for one. She was a lot older than he-ten or so years-but interesting. According to the skipper, she was a Ph.D. planetologist with a bachelor's in invertebrate zoology. The academic degrees had made her eligible for this mission, but no more eligible than many others. What had made the difference, Weygand said, was her temperament, and her record as a field leader. "Those, and being smart as they get."
Smart, Stoorvol thought, meant different things to different people. But she'd made a good impression on him when they'd boarded the scout and she'd seen him stash his rucker in a locker. "Why the rucksack?" she'd asked. He'd always resented gratuitous requests to explain himself, certainly from people he didn't know well. So he'd simply said it held things he might need, and with a nod she'd let it go at that.
Besides thinking about women, he revisited old conflicts-fierce rivalries as a kid growing up; fistfights at boot camp and on pass; and later, one at the Academy, where fights were seriously frowned on. He'd almost always won, but the last had nearly gotten him expelled. He'd been young then, he told himself. He looked at things differently from the vantage of twenty-eight years.
And he thought about the collection missions-the collection of hornets and the collection of prisoners. (He was to protect the first mission and lead the second.) If everything went according to drill… Things seldom did, of course. It wasn't wise to rely on scripts. They were fine as a starting place, and even as a guide, but they weren't likely to survive a complete mission. Major Asahara had stressed that in Military Planning 202. Because others, notably the enemy, had their own scripts, and typically the physical universe added serious unforeseens. Things happened, and necessity often demanded snap decisions, with different people commonly responding differently. And in case his cadets didn't believe him, Asahara, as game master in their electronic war game labs, would throw in unforeseeables that required unexpected and often drastic improvisations: new tactics, new strategies, even new objectives.
Stoorvol could still quote the major, or nearly enough to make no difference: "Say you have a battle plan that will win this major battle for you. And a seriously chancy departure from it that, if successful, could win the war; but, if unsuccessful, would be a disaster. Discuss the factors in choosing, and create examples."
For days the class had gone round and round on that. It had been the most valuable discussion they'd had. And among the factors had been alien mentalities. Because if they ever fought a war-a real war, a serious war-it would be against alien invaders. None of them doubted it. It was the truism behind every plan War House made, everything it did. It had been for centuries.
In Stoorvol's ruminations, any verbalization was silent and in Terran. As with most Terrans, Terran was his only language. Olavsdottir had commented that his surname looked Norwegian with an Americanized spelling, probably from the late 19th or early 20th century. That had been news to him. The Americas had been Terra's great ethnic melting pot; the rest of the world was only now catching up. He'd never wondered about his ancestry, which besides various European roots, included Dakotah, Ibo, Samoan and Kachin.
***
Hour by hour, the Wyzhnyny settlement site crept across the face of Tagus, toward the terminator near the east limb of the visible hemisphere. Before the continent disappeared, a larger edged into sight. On the same watch, a settlement appeared on the new continent, and later a third, both marked by electronic activity. One was at a northern latitude, in what appeared to be a steppe. The other was in a large basin between two high, subtropical mountain ranges. Neither was at all like the tropical rainforest Morgan had described.
"So," Stoorvol said, "now the question is whether there's a fourth one down there somewhere."
Some hours later they were satisfied there wasn't. The first one was the right one. Meanwhile they'd learned the number of surveillance buoys parked off the planet-four of them, located to provide coverage of the colonized continents.
Their next task was to scout Tagus's surface. Stoorvol was about to generate warpdrive when they learned there were indeed Wyzhnyny warships in the system. Their sensors picked up one of them a scant few hundred miles from where they watched in SRS 12/1. It was departing Tagus's single moon, and crossing to the planet in gravdrive. Why the Wyzhnyny had been on the moon, or very near it, and whether others still lurked there, neither Terran knew.
So instead of generating warpspace and crossing invisibly to Tagus, Stoorvol backed away in gravdrive, then returned to the Bering with a short warp jump, to let the captain know about the Wyzhnyny ship.
***
Captain Weygand promptly sent another two-man team out in SRS 12/2, to watch from the limb.
After listening to Stoorvol and Olavsdottir, he decided to skip the surface scouting. With four Wyzhnyny surveillance buoys, and possibly a space force on the moon's nearside, they might very well get only one chance before having to flee the system. So the first crossing would be for hornet collection-much the most feasible and least dangerous of their two missions.
The logic was inescapable, but it left Stoorvol ill at ease. In his heart of hearts, the most dangerous foray held priority, and at any rate, live Wyzhnyny prisoners seemed more valuable than ho
rnets to the war effort.
Some hours later, the hornet collection team boarded the 46-foot collection boat, the Mei-Li, sometimes termed "the nursing whale" because she was carried outboard. The hornet collection team consisted of Alfhild Olavsdottir and two entomology techs, plus both squads of marine commandos for ground security. Paul Stoorvol would pilot the crossing, with PO1 Achmed Menges as copilot. Two weapons techs rode in the Mei-Li's gun bubbles.
Slipping the magnetic tie that held the Mei-Li to the gangway lock, Stoorvol separated from the Bering. At 200 feet from the surface, he activated the strange-space generator for warpdrive. Then departed the vicinity of the Bering much faster than he would have in gravdrive, though not remotely approaching full warpspeed. Not this close to planetary bodies. Invisible from F-space, they quickly cleared the limb, and saw Tagus again on their screens. Not as a blue and white sphere against deep, star-strewn black, but a computer artifact-a featureless silver globe against utterly starless indigo blue. Shipsmind could mock up something very similar to the planet's F-space appearance, even dubbing in star images. But the Admiralty specified silver on indigo for simulations in warpspace, to remind the watch it wasn't real.
At the Marine Academy, Captain Esteron had shown them a screen full of mathematics, telling them it best represented the warpspace view of a planet. He hadn't expected them to sort it out. He'd simply been making a point. He went on to discuss warpspace in non-mathematical terms. In a sense, you couldn't be in warpspace; warpspace has no material content. A ship "in warpspace" actually occupied an anomaly. Before generating warpspace, you're in F-space-familiar space-which is "permeated by the warpspace potentiality." The strange-space generator generates what can be thought of as a "bubble" of warpspace, which is free to move within the warpspace potentiality at "speeds" greater than light in F-space. And that "carrier bubble" of warpspace contains an inclusion-a bubble of F-space intimately surrounding the scout and its contents. A ship within a bubble within a bubble.
According to Captain Esteron, it could be understood only through the appropriate mathematics, and even that depended on what's meant by "understood." The bottom line was, you can leave Terra in warpdrive and arrive at Alpha Centauri in far less time than a photon could. And without inertia. In warpspace you're not only exempt from the light-speed limitation, your ship is stationary within its own little universe-its "carrier bubble."
Stoorvol had decided then not to worry about it. Accept it, yes. Get used to it, sure. Learn to control it, damn right! He'd quickly done all three, and become a competent warpspace pilot-not very difficult in routine circumstances.
Especially with the safekeeps built into shipsminds, to constrain warpspeeds in the vicinity of planetary bodies. For there, the "interfacing" of F-space and warpspace is more or less distorted, and pseudo-speeds must be moderate. Otherwise distortion could rupture your carrier bubble. Which could leave you abruptly in F-space, with momentum a function of your warpdrive pseudo-speed. If that happens at a pseudo-speed greater than c, ship and contents are converted instantly into energy. The resulting explosion is terrific.
Even at only a few-score miles per minute, a ruptured carrier bubble would convert a crew into strawberry jam.
Thus the crossing to Tagus took twenty-eight careful minutes. But they were also twenty-eight invisible minutes. The odds of a Wyzhnyny ship passing in warpspace near enough to detect your carrier bubble by chance were extremely low. While the prospect of being detected in warpspace by a ship in F-space was essentially nil.
The danger lay not in the crossing to Tagus. It lay in the fine maneuvering very close in. There, complex interface distortions made travel vectors tricky, and carelessness or clumsiness could easily be fatal.
***
So while the crossing took twenty-eight minutes, finding a suitable place to emerge required two hours of slow and careful sensor groping. Finally Stoorvol found what he wanted-a gorge. He recognized it by the nature of the grav-line distortions in the F-space potentiality, blurred though they were, and it was on the right part of the right continent. He groped his way almost to the bottom.
Emergence would cause a momentary surge of 80-kilocycle radio waves, a distinctive artifact that would hardly be misinterpreted. It was the primary reason he'd wanted to emerge deep in a gorge. A surge there would hardly be picked up by a ground installation, nor by any of the surveillance buoys, given their positions in space.
Once back in F-space, he keyed the gravitic matrix, and shipsmind gave him coordinates-0.65 degrees east of the Wyzhnyny settlement. The gorge was visible on the map the scout had generated during its surveillance from the lunar limb. It was one of the larger gorges leading down from a broad basaltic plateau to the ocean, and the Mei-Li had emerged only thirty feet from the bottom.
He turned the helm over to PO-1 Menges, who raised the craft almost to the rim. Then two of the Mei-Li's work scooters transferred the marines, plus Olavsdottir and the two entomology techs, to the plateau top. Stoorvol flew one of the scooters.
He left most of the marines on the rim with Gunnery Sergeant Gabaldon, to set up an inconspicuous defense point. Then, with Olavsdottir, two marines and a pair of hornet traps, Stoorvol left on one scooter. Three other marines and both entomology techs followed on the other, with four more traps. The scouts' gravdrives were designed to have a minimal EM signature, though even that might be picked up if they rose much above the rainforest canopy.
"Just tell me where to go," Stoorvol said. Olavsdottir scanned across the forest roof. "Take me higher," she said. "I can't see enough from here."
He glanced at the coordinate grid on his display, then raised the scooter straight up, while the planetologist looked around. At two hundred feet above the forest she spoke again, pointing. "There," she said. "There's a pretty good opening over there about half a mile."
He saw where she meant: a two-acre gap in the forest canopy, probably a blowdown patch. "Right," he said, and took the scooter down almost to the treetops before heading there, dodging the occasional emergent that loomed above its leafy neighbors.
The gap proved unsuitable, filled with a dense growth of young forest half as tall as the surrounding older stand. They traveled several miles and checked four more gaps before they crossed a long low ridge and saw what they needed. A mile ahead, on the far side of a smaller gorge, a sizeable area of forest had burned. As they drew near, Olavsdottir said, "That's it. Set her down there."
They landed near the center, away from the gorge. Clearly the fire had been intense. It seemed to Stoorvol he knew the place from Morgan's reports. This lesser gorge was the approach to the old pirate base. And the fire? The Wyzhnyny had razed the forest there after they'd traced Morgan to his bolt hole.
Olavsdottir wasn't speculating on the burn's origin. She was soaking in its ecology. The forest regrowth was still patchy; much of the ground was covered with herbage and low shrubs. Flowers were rampant, and "berries" abundant. Insects in quantity visited both, probing blossoms or tapping fruit juices with their proboscises. There would be hornets, she was sure. And if they were nearly as large as Morgan had described, they'd be predators, preying on other "insects."
She turned to the field entomologists. "This is it, people," she said. "Let's do it." From her small day pack she took something that, unfolded, proved to be a hat with a net rolled on its brim. Putting it on, she secured the net around her collar, then donned tough gloves. The techs did the same.
Then she turned to the scooters where the marines stood watching with their captain. "Stay here," she told Stoorvol, "and leave your repellent fields off. They disorient insect behavior over an area a lot larger than the repellent radius."
Stoorvol watched the hooded collectors walk off in different directions across the burn, heads swiveling slowly as they searched. Sergeant Haynes grunted. "She didn't need to tell us that. We know the drill."
"She's not used to the Corps," Stoorvol said, "and civilians generally need reminding. Otherwise no telling wh
at they'd do."
He'd hardly said it when his radio beeped. He took it from his belt. Its transmitter was directional, so he pointed it east. "Stoorvol," he answered. "This had better be good. If I can read your signal, they can pick it up at the Wyzhnyny base."
"Captain, a bogie just passed over!" The voice was Menges'. "Crossed the gorge about two hundred yards north, headed west! If anyone on board was looking our way, he'd have seen us. Or if they had their sensors on… They shouldn't pick up our radio traffic though. Way different wavelengths."
Unless they're scanning. "What kind of bogey?"
"A smallish craft of some sort, sir."
A smallish craft. That could be different things, some armed, some not. "Thanks, Boats. Gabaldon, are you on?"
Sergeant Gabaldon answered from the rim. "Right, Captain."
"Okay. Listen up both of you. They probably didn't see you. Otherwise they wouldn't have gone right on like they did." I hope, he added silently. "Gabaldon, get your people back aboard the Mei-Li, now! Boats, as soon as they're on board, fly south down the gorge, a mile at least, and even with the rim. Find a place where you can fit that frigging barge back into the forest, between the trees. Far enough back that you can't be seen from the gorge. Or from the air." And let's hope the Wyzhnyny don't scan the forest with grav sensors. "Another thing: when you're in your hiding place, register your coordinates to four decimals. But don't send them till I ask. Keep radio silence. Got that?"
"Yessir," Menges said. "Radio silence. Are you coming back now, sir?"
"Hell no! We've got hornets to catch! Now remember: don't send again till I tell you. Stoorvol out."
He looked toward Olavsdottir moving slowly across the burn, and clicked his helmet mike. "Doctor, a bogey may have spotted the Mei-Li. I'm moving both scooters under the trees. Continue as you are. If I trigger my alarm, crouch down and make yourselves as small as possible. And don't-repeat don't-flatten yourself on the ground."