CHAPTER 13 2 страница

For the next two weeks I was never so busy—not even in boot camp. Working as an ordnance & armor mech about ten hours a day was not all that I did. Math, of course—and no way to duck it with the Skipper tutoring me. Meals -- say an hour and a half a day. Plus the mechanics of staying alive -- shaving, showering, putting buttons in uniforms and trying to chase down the Navy master-at-arms, get him to unlock the laundry to locate clean uniforms ten minutes before inspection. (It is an unwritten law of the Navy that facilities must always be locked when they are most needed. )

Guard mount, parade, inspections, a minimum of platoon routine, took another hour a day. But besides, I was " George. " Every outfit has a " George. " He's the most junior officer and has the extra jobs -- athletics officer, mail censor, referee for competitions, school officer, correspondence courses officer, prosecutor courts-martial, treasurer of the welfare mutual loan fund, custodian of registered publications, stores officer, troopers' mess officer, et cetera ad endless nauseam.

Rusty Graham had been " George" until he happily turned it over to me. He wasn't so happy when I insisted on a sight inventory on everything for which I had to sign. He suggested that if I didn't have sense enough to accept a commissioned officer's signed inventory then perhaps a direct order would change my tune. So I got sullen and told him to put his orders in writing—with a certified copy so that I could keep the original and endorse the copy over to the team commander.

Rusty angrily backed down -- even a second lieutenant isn't stupid enough to put such orders in writing. I wasn't happy either as Rusty was my roommate and was then still my tutor in math, but we held the sight inventory. I got chewed out by Lieutenant Warren for being stupidly officious but he opened his safe and let me check his registered publications. Captain Blackstone opened his with no comment and I couldn't tell whether he approved of my sight inventory or not.

Publications were okay but accountable property was not. Poor Rusty! He had accepted his predecessor's count and now the count was short—and the other officer was not merely gone, he was dead. Rusty spent a restless night (and so did I! ), then went to Blackie and told him the truth.

Blackie chewed him out, then went over the missing items, found ways to expend most of them as " lost in combat. " It reduced Rusty's shortages to a few days' pay—but Blackie had him keep the job, thereby postponing the cash reckoning indefinitely.

Not all " George" jobs caused that much headache. There were no courts-martial; good combat teams don't have them. There was no mail to censor as the ship was in Cherenkov drive. Same for welfare loans for similar reasons. Athletics I delegated to Brumby; referee was " if and when. " The troopers' mess was excellent; I initialed menus and sometimes inspected the galley, i. e., I scrounged a sandwich without getting out of dungarees when working late in the armory. Correspondence courses meant a lot of paperwork since quite a few were continuing their educations, war or no war -- but I delegated my platoon sergeant and the records were kept by the PFC who was his clerk.

Nevertheless " George" jobs soaked up about two hours every day—there were so many.

You see where this left me—ten hours O & A, three hours math, meals an hour and a half, personal one hour, military fiddlework one hour, " George" two hours, sleep eight hours total, twenty-six and a half hours. The ship wasn't even on the twenty-five-hour Sanctuary day; once we left we went on Greenwich standard and the universal calendar.

The only slack was in my sleeping time.

I was sitting in the cardroom about one o'clock one morning, plugging away at math, when Captain Blackstone came in. I said, " Good evening, Captain. "

" Morning, you mean. What the deuce ails you, son? Insomnia? "

" Uh, not exactly. "

He picked up a stack of sheets, remarking, " Can't your sergeant handle your paperwork? Oh, I see. Go to bed. "

" But, Captain—"

" Sit back down. Johnnie, I've been meaning to talk to you. I never see you here in the cardroom, evenings. I walk past your room, you're at your desk. When your bunkie goes to bed, you move out here. What's the trouble? "

" Well... I just never seem to get caught up. "

" Nobody ever does. How's the work going in the armory? "

" Pretty well. I think we'll make it. "

" I think so, too. Look, son, you've got to keep a sense of proportion. You have two prime duties. First is to see that your platoon's equipment is ready -- you're doing that. You don't have to worry about the platoon itself, I told you that. The second -- and just as important—you've got to be ready to fight. You're muffing that. "

" I'll be ready, Captain. "

" Nonsense and other comments. You're getting no exercise and losing sleep. Is that how to train for a drop? When you lead a platoon, son, you've got to be on the bounce. From here on you will exercise from sixteen-thirty to eighteen hundred each day. You will be in your sack with lights out at twenty-three hundred—and if you lie awake fifteen minutes two nights in a row, you will report to the Surgeon for treatment. Orders. "

" Yes, sir. " I felt the bulkheads closing in on me and added desperately, " Captain, I don't see how I can get to bed by twenty-three— and still get everything done. "

" Then you won't. As I said, son, you must have a sense of proportion. Tell me how you spend your time. "

So I did. He nodded. " Just as I thought. " He picked up my math " homework, " tossed it in front of me. " Take this. Sure, you want to work on it. But why work so hard before we go into action? "

" Well, I thought—"

" ‘Think' is what you didn't do. There are four possibilities, and only one calls for finishing these assignments. First, you might buy a farm. Second, you might buy a small piece and be retired with an honorary commission. Third, you might come through all right... but get a downcheck on your Form Thirty-One from your examiner, namely me. Which is just what you're aching for at the present time—why, son, I won't even let you drop if you show up with eyes red from no sleep and muscles flabby from too much chair parade. The fourth possibility is that you take a grip on yourself... in which case I might let you take a swing at leading a platoon. So let's assume that you do and put on the finest show since Achilles slew Hector and I pass you. In that case only -- you'll need to finish these math assignments. So do them on the trip back.

" That takes care of that—I'll tell the Skipper. The rest of those jobs you are relieved of, right now. On our way home you can spend your time on math. If we get home. But you'll never get anywhere if you don't learn to keep first things first. Go to bed! "

A week later we made rendezvous, coming out of drive and coasting short of the speed of light while the fleet exchanged signals. We were sent Briefing, Battle Plan, our Mission & Orders—a stack of words as long as a novel—and were told not to drop.

Oh, we were to be in the operation but we would ride down like gentlemen, cushioned in retrieval boats. This we could do because the Federation already held the surface; Second, Third, and Fifth M. I. Divisions had taken it—and paid cash.

The described real estate didn't seem worth the price. Planet P is smaller than Terra, with a surface gravity of 0. 7, is mostly arctic-cold ocean and rock, with lichenous flora and no fauna of interest. Its air is not breathable for long, being contaminated with nitrous oxide and too much ozone. Its one continent is about half the size of Australia, plus many worthless islands; it would probably require as much terra-forming as Venus before we could use it.

However we were not buying real estate to live on; we went there because Bugs were there—and they were there on our account, so Staff thought. Staff told us that Planet P was an uncompleted advance base (prob. 87+-6 per cent) to be used against us.

Since the planet was no prize, the routine way to get rid of this Bug base would be for the Navy to stand off at a safe distance and render this ugly spheroid uninhabitable by Man or Bug. But the C-in-C had other ideas.

The operation was a raid. It sounds incredible to call a battle involving hundreds of ships and thousands of casualties a " raid, " especially as, in the meantime, the Navy and a lot of other cap troopers were keeping things stirred up many light-years into Bug space in order to divert them from reinforcing Planet P.

But the C-in-C was not wasting men; this giant raid could determine who won the war, whether next year or thirty years hence. We needed to learn more about Bug psychology. Must we wipe out every Bug in the Galaxy? Or was it possible to trounce them and impose a peace? We did not know; we understood them as little as we understand termites. To learn their psychology we had to communicate with them, learn their motivations, find out why they fought and under what conditions they would stop; for these, the Psychological Warfare Corps needed prisoners.

Workers are easy to capture. But a Bug worker is hardly more than animate machinery. Warriors can be captured by burning off enough limbs to make them helpless—but they are almost as stupid without a director as workers. From such prisoners our own professor types had learned important matters—the development of that oily gas that killed them but not us came from analyzing the biochemistries of workers and warriors, and we had had other new weapons from such research even in the short time I had been a cap trooper. But to discover why Bugs fight we needed to study members of their brain caste. Also, we hoped to exchange prisoners.

So far, we had never taken a brain Bug alive. We had either cleaned out colonies from the surface, as on Sheol, or (as had too often been the case) raiders had gone down their holes and not come back. A lot of brave men had been lost this way.

Still more had been lost through retrieval failure. Sometimes a team on the ground had its ship or ships knocked out of the sky. What happens to such a team? Possibly it dies to the last man. More probably it fights until power and ammo are gone, then survivors are captured as easily as so many beetles on their backs.

From our co belligerents the Skinnies we knew that many missing troopers were alive as prisoners -- thousands we hoped, hundreds we were sure. Intelligence believed that prisoners were always taken to Klendathu; the Bugs are as curious about us as we are about them -- a race of individuals able to build cities, starships, armies, may be even more mysterious to a hive entity than a hive entity is to us.

As may be, we wanted those prisoners back!

In the grim logic of the universe this may be a weakness. Perhaps some race that never bothers to rescue an individual may exploit this human trait to wipe us out. The Skinnies have such a trait only slightly and the Bugs don't seem to have it at all -- nobody ever saw a Bug come to the aid of another because he was wounded; they cooperate perfectly in fighting but units are abandoned the instant they are no longer useful.

Our behavior is different. How often have you seen a headline like this? -- TWO DIE ATTEMPTING RESCUE OF DROWNING CHILD. If a man gets lost in the mountains, hundreds will search and often two or three searchers are killed. But the next time somebody gets lost just as many volunteers turn out.

Poor arithmetic... but very human. It runs through all our folklore, all human religions, all our literature a racial conviction that when one human needs rescue, others should not count the price.

Weakness? It might be the unique strength that wins us a Galaxy.

Weakness or strength, Bugs don't have it; there was no prospect of trading fighters for fighters.

But in a hive polyarchy, some castes are valuable or so our Psych Warfare people hoped. If we could capture brain Bugs, alive and undamaged, we might be able to trade on good terms.

And suppose we captured a queen!

What is a queen's trading value? A regiment of troopers? Nobody knew, but Battle Plan ordered us to capture Bug " royalty, " brains and queens, at any cost, on the gamble that we could trade them for human beings.

The third purpose of Operation Royalty was to develop methods: how to go down, how to dig them out, how to win with less than total weapons. Trooper for warrior, we could now defeat them above ground; ship for ship, our Navy was better; but, so far, we had had no luck when we tried to go down their holes.

If we failed to exchange prisoners on any terms, then we still had to: (a) win the war, (b) do so in a way that gave us a fighting chance to rescue our own people, or (c) —might as well admit it—die trying and lose. Planet P was a field test to determine whether we could learn how to root them out.

Briefing was read to every trooper and he heard it again in his sleep during hypno preparation. So, while we all knew that Operation Royalty was laying the groundwork toward eventual rescue of our mates, we also knew that Planet P held no human prisoners—it had never been raided. So there was no reason to buck for medals in a wild hope of being personally in on a rescue; it was just another Bug hunt, but conducted with massive force and new techniques. We were going to peel that planet like an onion, until we knew that every Bug had been dug out.

The Navy had plastered the islands and that unoccupied part of the continent until they were radioactive glaze; we could tackle Bugs with no worries about our rear. The Navy also maintained a ball-of-yarn patrol in tight orbits around the planet, guarding us, escorting transports, keeping a spy watch on the surface to make sure that Bugs did not break out behind us despite that plastering.

Under the Battle Plan, the orders for Blackie's Blackguards charged us with supporting the prime Mission when ordered or as opportunity presented, relieving another company in a captured area, protecting units of other corps in that area, maintaining contact with M. I. units around us -- and smacking down any Bugs that showed their ugly heads.

So we rode down in comfort to an unopposed landing. I took my platoon out at a powered-armor trot. Blackie went ahead to meet the company commander he was relieving, get the situation and size up the terrain. He headed for the horizon like a scared jack rabbit.

I had Cunha send his first section's scouts out to locate the forward corners of my patrol area and I sent my platoon sergeant off to my left to make contact with a patrol from the Fifth Regiment. We, the Third Regiment, had a grid three hundred miles wide and eighty miles deep to hold; my piece was a rectangle forty miles deep and seventeen wide in the extreme left flank forward corner. The Wolverines were behind us, Lieutenant Khoroshen's platoon on the right and Rusty beyond him.

Our First Regiment had already relieved a Vth Div. regiment ahead of us, with a " brick wall" overlap which placed them on my corner as well as ahead. " Ahead" and " rear, " " right flank" and " left, " referred to orientation set up in deadreckoning tracers in each command suit to match the grid of the Battle Plan. We had no true front, simply an area, and the only fighting at the moment was going on several hundred miles away, to our arbitrary right and rear.

Somewhere off that way, probably two hundred miles, should be 2nd platoon, G Co, 2nd Batt, 3rd Reg—commonly known as " The Roughnecks. "

Or the Roughnecks might be forty light-years away. Tactical organization never matches the Table of Organization; all I knew from Plan was that something called the " 2nd Batt" was on our right flank beyond the boys from the Normandy Beach. But that battalion could have been borrowed from another division. The Sky Marshal plays his chess without consulting the pieces.

Anyhow, I should not be thinking about the Roughnecks; I had all I could do as a Blackguard. My platoon was okay for the moment—safe as you can be on a hostile planet—but I had plenty to do before Cunha's first squad reached the far corner. I needed to:

1. Locate the platoon leader who had been holding my area.

2. Establish corners and identify them to section and squad leaders.

3. Make contact liaison with eight platoon leaders on my sides and corners, five of whom should already be in position (those from Fifth and First Regiments) and three (Khoroshen of the Blackguards and Bayonne and Sukarno of the Wolverines) who were now moving into position.

4. Get my own boys spread out to their initial points as fast as possible by shortest routes.

The last had to be set up first, as the open column in which we disembarked would not do it. Brumby's last squad needed to deploy to the left flank; Cunha's leading squad needed to spread from dead ahead to left oblique; the other four squads must fan out in between.

This is a standard square deployment and we had simulated how to reach it quickly in the drop room; I called out: " Cunha! Brumby! Time to spread ‘em out, " using the non-com circuit.

" Roger sec one! " —" Roger sec two! "

" Section leaders take charge... and caution each recruit. You'll be passing a lot of Cherubs. I don't want ‘em shot at by mistake! " I bit down for my private circuit and said, " Sarge, you got contact on the left? "

" Yes, sir. They see me, they see you. "

" Good. I don't see a beacon on our anchor corner—"

" Missing. "

" -- so you coach Cunha by D. R. Same for the lead scout—that's Hughes -- and have Hughes set a new beacon. " I wondered why the Third or Fifth hadn't replaced that anchor beacon—my forward left corner where three regiments came together.

No use talking. I went on: " D. R. check. You bear two seven five, miles twelve. "

" Sir, reverse is nine six, miles twelve scant. "

" Close enough. I haven't found my opposite number yet, so I'm cutting out forward at max. Mind the shop. "

" Got ‘em, Mr. Rico. "

I advanced at max speed while clicking over to officers' circuit:

" Square Black One, answer. Black One, Chang's Cherubs—do you read me? Answer. " I wanted to talk with the leader of the platoon we were relieving -- and not for any perfunctory I-relieve-you-sir: I wanted the ungarnished word.

I didn't like what I had seen.

Either the top brass had been optimistic in believing that we had mounted overwhelming force against a small, not fully developed Bug base— or the Blackguards had been awarded the spot where the roof fell in. In the few moments I had been out of the boat I had spotted half a dozen armored suits on the ground—empty I hoped, dead men possibly, but ‘way too many any way you looked at it.

Besides that, my tactical radar display showed a full platoon (my own) moving into position but only a scattering moving back toward retrieval or still on station. Nor could I see any system to their movements.

I was responsible for 680 square miles of hostile terrain and I wanted very badly to find out all I could before my own squads were deep into it. Battle Plan had ordered a new tactical doctrine which I found dismaying: Do not close the Bugs tunnels. Blackie had explained this as if it had been his own happy thought, but I doubt if he liked it.

The strategy was simple, and, I guess, logical... if we could afford the losses. Let the Bugs come up. Meet them and kill them on the surface. Let them keep on coming up. Don't bomb their holes, don't gas their holes— let them out. After a while—a day, two days, a week if we really did have overwhelming force, they would stop coming up. Planning Staff estimated (don't ask me how! ) that the Bugs would expend 70 per cent to 90 per cent of their warriors before they stopped trying to drive us off the surface.

Then we would start the unpeeling, killing surviving warriors as we went down and trying to capture " royalty" alive. We knew what the brain caste looked like; we had seen them dead (in photographs) and we knew they could not run -- barely functional legs, bloated bodies that were mostly nervous system. Queens no human had ever seen, but Bio War Corps had prepared sketches of what they should look like—obscene monsters larger than a horse and utterly immobile.

Besides brains and queens there might be other " royalty" castes. As might be—encourage their warriors to come out and die, then capture alive anything but warriors and workers.

A necessary plan and very pretty, on paper. What it meant to me was that I had an area 17 x 40 miles which might be riddled with unstopped Bug holes. I wanted co-ordinates on each one.

If there were too many... well, I might accidentally plug a few and let my boys concentrate on watching the rest. A private in a marauder suit can cover a lot of terrain, but he can look at only one thing at a time; he is not superhuman.

I bounced several miles ahead of the first squad, still calling the Cherub platoon leader, varying it by calling any Cherub officer and describing the pattern of my transponder beacon (dah-di-dah-dah).

No answer—

At last I got a reply from my boss: " Johnnie! Knock off the noise.

Answer me on conference circuit. "

So I did, and Blackie told me crisply to quit trying to find the Cherub leader for Square Black One; there wasn't one. Oh, there might be a non-com alive somewhere but the chain of command had broken.

By the book, somebody always moves up. But it does happen if too many links are knocked out. As Colonel Nielssen had once warned me, in the dim past... almost a month ago.

Captain Chang had gone into action with three officers besides himself; there was one left now (my classmate, Abe Moise) and Blackie was trying to find out from him the situation. Abe wasn't much help. When I joined the conference and identified myself, Abe thought I was his battalion commander and made a report almost heartbreakingly precise, especially as it made no sense at all.

Blackie interrupted and told me to carry on. " Forget about a relief briefing. The situation is whatever you see that it is—so stir around and see. "

" Right, Boss! " I slashed across my own area toward the far corner, the anchor corner, as fast as I could move, switching circuits on my first bounce. " Sarge! How about that beacon? "

" No place on that corner to put it, sir. A fresh crater there, about scale six. "

I whistled to myself. You could drop the Tours into a size six crater. One of the dodges the Bugs used on us when we were sparring, ourselves on the surface, Bugs underground, was land mines. (They never seemed to use missiles, except from ships in space. ) If you were near the spot, the ground shock got you; if you were in the air when one went off, the concussion wave could tumble your gyros and throw your suit out of control.

I had never seen larger than a scale-four crater. The theory was that they didn't dare use too big an explosion because of damage to their troglodyte habitats, even if they cofferdammed around it.

" Place an offset beacon, " I told him. " Tell section and squad leaders. "

" I have, sir. Angle one one oh, miles one point three. Da-di-dit. You should be able to read it, bearing about three three& #382; five from where you are. " He sounded as calm as a sergeant-instructor at drill and I wondered if I were letting my voice get shrill.

I found it in my display, above my left eyebrow—long and two shorts. " Okay. I see Cunha's first squad is nearly in position. Break off that squad, have it patrol the crater. Equalize the areas—Brumby will have to take four more miles of depth. " I thought with annoyance that each man already had to patrol fourteen square miles; spreading the butter so thin meant seventeen square miles per man—and a Bug can come out of a hole less that five feet wide.

I added, " How ‘hot' is that crater? "

" Amber-red at the edge. I haven't been in it, sir. "

" Stay out of it. I'll check it later. " Amber-red would kill an unprotected human but a trooper in armor can take it for quite a time. If there was that much radiation at the edge, the bottom would no doubt fry your eyeballs. " Tell Naidi to pull Malan and Bjork back to amber zone, and have them set up ground listeners. " Two of my five recruits were in that first squad—and recruits are like puppies; they stick their noses into things.

" Tell Naidi that I am interested in two things: movement inside the crater... and noises in the ground around it. " We wouldn't send troopers out through a hole so radioactive that mere exit would kill them. But Bugs would, if they could reach us that way. " Have Naidi report to me. To you and me. I mean. "

" Yes, sir. " My platoon sergeant added, " May I make a suggestion? "

" Of course. And don't stop to ask permission next time. "

" Navarre can handle the rest of the first section. Sergeant Cunha could take the squad at the crater and leave Naidi free to supervise the ground-listening watch. "

I know what he was thinking. Naidi, so newly a corporal that he had never before had a squad on the ground, was hardly the man to cover what looked like the worst danger point in Square Black One; he wanted to pull Naidi back for the same reasons I had pulled the recruits back.

I wonder if he knew what I was thinking? That " nut-cracker" -- he was using the suit he had worn as Blackie's battalion staffer, he had one more circuit than I had, a private one to Captain Blackstone.

Blackie was probably patched in and listening via that extra circuit. Obviously my platoon sergeant did not agree with my disposition of the platoon. If I didn't take his advice, the next thing I heard might be Blackie's voice cutting in: " Sergeant, take charge. Mr. Rico, you're relieved. "

But -- Confound it, a corporal who wasn't allowed to boss his squad wasn't a corporal... and a platoon leader who was just a ventriloquist's dummy for his platoon sergeant was an empty suit!

I didn't mull this. It flashed through my head and I answered at once. " I can't spare a corporal to baby-sit with two recruits. Nor a sergeant to boss four privates and a lance. "

" But—"

" Hold it. I want the crater watch relieved every hour. I want our first patrol sweep made rapidly. Squad leaders will check any hole reported and get beacon bearings so that section leaders, platoon sergeant and platoon leader can check them as they reach them. If there aren't too many, we'll put a watch on each—I'll decide later. "

" Yes, sir. "

" Second time around, I want a slow patrol, as tight as possible, to catch holes we miss on the first sweep. Assistant squad leaders will use snoopers on that pass. Squad leaders will get bearings on any troopers—or suits—on the ground; the Cherubs may have left some live wounded. But no one is to stop even to check physicals until I order it. We've got to know the Bug situation first. "

" Yes, sir. "

" Suggestions? "

" Just one, " he answered. " I think the squad chasers should use their snoopers on that first fast pass. "

" Very well, do it that way. " His suggestion made sense as the surface air temperature was much lower than the Bugs use in their tunnels; a camouflaged vent hole should show a plume like a geyser by infrared vision. I glanced at my display. " Cunha's boys are almost at limit. Start your parade. '

" Very well, sir! "

" Off. " I clicked over to the wide circuit and continued to make tracks for the crater while I listened to everybody at once as my platoon sergeant revised the pre-plan—cutting out one squad, heading it for the crater, starting the rest of the first section in a two-squad countermarch while keeping the second section in a rotational sweep as pre-planned but with four miles increased depth; got the sections moving, dropped them and caught the first squad as it converged on the anchor corner crater, gave it its instructions; cut back to the section leaders in plenty of time to give them new beacon bearings at which to make their turns.

He did it with the smart precision of a drum major on parade and he did it faster and in fewer words than I could have done it. Extended-order powered-suit drill, with a platoon spread over many miles of countryside, is much more difficult than the strutting precision of parade—but it has to be exact, or you'll blow the head off your mate in action... or, as in this case, you sweep part of the terrain twice and miss another part.