“DID SOMEBODY FART?” Michaels said, too loudly, hitching up his weapons belt as he stood over the aliens’ table. The nonregulation buckle on the Aristan SOG major’s belt said, “I’m the Guy Your Mother Warned You About,” in raised titanium letters; the belt was cutting into the major’s gut because the flamethrower slung on it was so heavy.
The giant ants seated at the table bent their noseless heads together and made whistling noises at each other. Then one of them twitched in Michaels’ direction, as if to rise to its full seven-foot height.
Michaels’ flamethrower came out of its quick-release scabbard already flaring, leaving a track of smoldering, scorched wood that actually ignited in places as the major brought his weapon to bear on the enemy.
The giant ant was breathing a methane-based atmosphere which he’d brought with him in a feeder tank. Which was too bad for the ant. The tank, the hoses to it, whatever the ant used for a nose, and every breathing passage inside of the ant exploded as soon as the flamethrower whooshed up his tall, slender black body.
McMurtry could see the whole thing in the mirror behind the bar where he waited for his drink. At the table, the other two giant ants, called Hothri, started unfolding themselves into erect positions—maybe to go for weapons, or perhaps just instinctively to help their fellow.
The first Hothri was already down on the wood floor, looking a whole lot worse than the family cat had, the night McMurtry’s brother had lit it back on Arista.
The other two, who either had hive minds and couldn’t help themselves, or just had an inordinate amount of respect for the about-to-be-dead, were down on the floor trying to extinguish their flaming fellow when Michaels depressed his trigger a second time and fried the other two ants, stepping back as he did so because they popped some when their tanks and lungs went.
In the mirror, it looked like a fireworks display gone to shit, rather than alien beings gone to glory in the first salvo of a trade war.
All around the bar, the rest of Michaels’ Special Forces team were keeping order. All but McMurtry. McMurtry didn’t think this was any kind of good idea, and Michaels knew it. So McMurtry’s job was to keep an eye on the bartender and everything else, using the bar’s mirror to make a covert record of the encounter through a minicam he wore pinned to his collar.
Since McMurtry was the COA (Cover Our Asses) officer on this little foray, he picked up his black beer and sipped it calmly, keeping one eye on the bartender, and the other on the mirror in case something went wrong.
Nothing was going to go wrong that the bartender had anything to do with. McMurtry had put his Aristan Military Industries machine pistol on the bar when Michaels approached the ants, just to make sure.
The bartender was watching the pistol, and McMurtry was watching the bartender—when he wasn’t watching the spitting multilegged bonfire and the frightened locals who were trying to get out the door any way they could.
Of course, you couldn’t get out the door—Sonny and Raven had the door covered. Sonny might have figured that the civilian Portu women, at least, ought to be let outside where the smell wasn’t so bad, but Raven was a hard case. Michaels had told Raven, their S-3, that nobody left.
Therefore, nobody left.
You couldn’t do Special Operations Group missions any way but by following orders. Even when the orders were dumber than Portu locals. McMurtry knew that. So he’d kept quiet when Michaels told everybody what the objective was: “Take out the local ant trading mission—all of ‘em. Arista doesn’t want Portu aiding and abetting these Hothri scum. We’re harrying and destroying Hothri wherever we find them, until the Portu humans get the message that harboring aliens isn’t a good idea.”
So it was economics at the heart of this: Arista didn’t like Hothri competition. To McMurtry’s way of thinking, that wasn’t a reason to field SOG personnel. But nobody was asking McMurtry what he thought.
Except, before they’d deployed here, Michaels had pulled him aside: “Something you don’t like about this mission, Sergeant?”
“No, sir,” McMurtry had said, looking straight into Michaels’ blue eyes. “You’ve got real survivability here, sir. However . . . “
“However?” Michaels had said.
“If we’re goin’ out purposely to get Hothri shit all over our shoes, shouldn’t we be sure we’ve got some way to wipe it off later—sir?”
“That’s a command decision, McMurtry. Not mine. You know that.”
“Yes, sir,” said McMurtry, and was willing to leave it at that. Fry the aliens the way Michaels had originally ordered, let the brass worry about repercussions.
But Michaels knew McMurtry better than to leave it at that. A Special Forces sergeant can usually run a good team without the team leader or the operations officer, and McMurtry had outlived two previous holders of Michaels’ slot, and Raven’s slot.
Michaels said, “Tell you what, McMurtry. You go in wired and I’ll do the shooting, this time.”
It wasn’t a consultation. It was an order. It was also close to a goddam slap across the face.
But it was Michaels’ team while he was ambulatory.
So McMurtry played eye-games with the bartender and watched the mirror to make sure his lapel-pin videocam was recording the proceedings.
Damn, if it hadn’t smelled real bad in here before, it sure did now. McMurtry had an almost unbearable urge to go to the bathroom: he wasn’t really a part of this action, and yet the “pucker factor”—the adrenalin rush that pulled his guts in tight—was real high in here.
McMurtry couldn’t sit out any more of this. He picked up the machine pistol, ported it, and turned—slowly, for the camera’s sake.
What patrons weren’t cued up trying to make Raven let them out, were trying to get away from the stinking, black smoke.
Lucky the whole place hadn’t blown. Nobody knew what would happen when you set fire to an ant that big, wearing methane-atmosphere augmentation.
But you couldn’t tell anybody back on Arista anything. Back on Arista, it was Arista forever; Arista, right or wrong; everything for the greater glory of the newest trading power in this sector of the universe.
Aristan trade usually meant exclusivity, high prices, and “protection.” Most of the time, the army was engaged in “protection.“
Right now, McMurtry would have given anything to be protecting a caravan, a trading mission to Hui Whey, a boat or a hypersonic. There was something about this mission that felt purely wrong.
He wasn’t in the pest extermination business.
And neither was his team. They didn’t know enough about what they were dealing with to come in this heavy-handed.
But here they were.
And so far, so good.
The ants hadn’t gotten back up out of the flames. There was an occasional crackle from the pile that used to be the Hothri traders. As McMurtry watched, a leg or an arm bone broke in a cascade of sparks, falling on the pile, making the burning heap shift a bit.
But that wasn’t serious.
The serious stuff was all happening over at the doorway where Michaels was putting the appropriate face on the mission, telling the locals what they’d just seen—winning hearts and minds, as the saying went, before he let them out to spread the word.
From over McMurtry’s shoulder, the bartender said, “Want another beer, soldier? On the house? This one’s got black scum on the top.”
“Yeah, okay,” McMurtry said, still watching Michaels and Raven.
Raven, their S-3, was this amazing female with a tiny waist and a real knack for logistics, strategy and tactics. If she’d been a woman of the sort McMurtry understood, he’d have been crazy in love with her. But she scared him, even after half a tour, so he kept his distance. When she was up and running, Raven was something to see. All grace and speed and lethality, with none of the split-second hesitations even the best of men displayed.
Raven, comforting a blond woman a full head shorter than she, was doing a passable imitation of a feeling being.
Only McMurtry knew better. The single one who might give him an argument about Raven’s purely murderous nature was Sonny, who (rumor had it) was sleeping with her.
But you didn’t ask if rumors were true. And you didn’t think about stuff like that. Raven was as good an S-3 as you could have for the low-intensity-conflict sort of mission that McMurtry’s Team 12 specialized in: she’d lasted twice as long as her direct predecessor.
If she weren’t so damned beautiful, with that wavy mane of dark hair and those big velvet eyes that looked at you over a pair of upward-tilting breasts, then maybe having her directly above him in the command chain wouldn’t make McMurtry so uncomfortable. But there she was. And he had to look at those breasts when they weren’t safe inside hardsuit armor, like—
Raven’s breasts blew apart. Her trunk spewed blue-purple-white-brown organs and pureed flesh mixed with spine.
The concussion of the blast that took out the door came slightly afterwards.
The bartender was just saying, “Here’s your beer—“
But all McMurtry could see was Raven with no chest and the surprised look in her big velvet eyes as her body was thrust forward by the force of whatever had holed her.
Then she fell, slowly—much slower, seemingly, than McMurtry as he dived for the wood floor boards, his machine pistol looking for a target.
There wasn’t a target.
There was almost nothing to shoot at, according to the feed he was getting from his sight control electronics. The rest of the twelve-man team had hit the deck, and taken the civilians with them. Everybody was down and covered.
The little shocks the pistol was feeding to his right wrist told him that it was still set for an ant target.
He reached out to set it to nondifferential, so that he could shoot at anything he wanted to, when the whole wall before him, front facade included, disappeared, taking with it what was left of Raven’s corpse in a bellow of physics and a pulverizing explosion.
Part of McMurtry‘s job was to know where all his people were, every minute.
He knew where everybody else had been, and one blink into the billow of explosion in front of him told McMurtry that there was no use waiting around to see if he had wounded or dead he could carry back.
Anyhow, there was only one priority at a time like this: get the intelligence back.
He scrambled backward, trying to get behind the bar, kicking over something as he did. He blinked repeatedly, trying to see something more than the mass of black/red/gold smoke and the silhouetted casualties in its midst.
He couldn’t. And he couldn’t hear anything either except the buzzing tones and electrical whine that was the blood in his ears.
When he made it behind the bar, he was panting and didn’t realize he was climbing over the bartender, until the man shoved at him.
The bartender’s face was bloody from a heavy scalp wound, so that his eye-whites looked yellow and his teeth were pink.
McMurtry yelled: “Another way out?”
The bartender gestured.
McMurtry ran without a backward look.
He could still see Raven’s chest exploding. Damn, why couldn’t it be the vision of silhouettes flung before the explosion that he was left with?
But it wasn’t. It never was, he thought as he stumbled through a back room full of kegs and dove through a door into loamy dirt. It never was the easy stuff you remembered.
He’d had a bad feeling about this mission all along, he told himself as,.against his better judgment, he crawled around the side of the building to get a peek at what had totaled its facade.
And then he saw ants. They’d never really seen ants before, he realized. They’d seen . . . a couple ants. Nothing like this.
Must be the hive mind thing. Lots of ants . . . kill one, the rest react.
The whole goddam main street of Portu Prince was covered with ants. The sky above was dark with ant aircraft—big stuff, not just little flyers—that must have been deployed from low orbit.
Shit. Now, McMurtry had to get out of here. The ants were methodically hosing down everything standing in Portu Prince.
The sound of the whistling ant language, coming through amplification devices, mixed with the rumble of ground vehicles and the whine of air cover, nearly masked the steady stream of curses coming from McMurtry’s own throat.
Damn Michaels. Damn SOG Command. Damn the whole Aristan Senate, and its Aristan Military Industries constituency, who hadn’t bothered to research the ants.
Hadn’t anybody wondered how they’d react? he asked himself as he sprinted along the alley, throat raw, machine pistol slippery in his grip?
Didn’t anybody remember the difference between trade war and real war? Business enemy and mortal enemy?
These ants were on the town of Portu Prince too fast, too hard, and too heavy for McMurtry to mistake what he was seeing back there.
And intel had to know. He had to get back with his record of the proceedings. Otherwije, Arista wasn’t going to know what kind of war it had just started, until the Hothri fell on the next unsuspecting human settlement—or the next. Because no Portu humans were going to be doing any talking about what had happened here—or what was happening here.
The gouts of flame, from area denial munitions pounding the main street behind him, attested to that.
McMurtry tried to leap over a barrel that had overturned and was rolling into his path. He miscalculated, and fell on it—with it, rolling.
Damn, too much noise.
The next thing he knew, he was crawling inside the barrel. He could hear that whistling, coming closer. Something overhead was screeching in a language he didn’t understand.
He huddled in the barrel, his machine pistol cradled against his chest as if he were some frightened little boy with a teddy bear, until the whistling receded and the thud of chopped air lessened as the air cover went on its way.
If he ever found out whose idea this was, he was going to kill the son of a bitch. He kept seeing Raven’s chest, exploding, all that pureed lung and heart, sprinkled with shards of bone.
Well, he thought, if it was any consolation, he’d been right about there being something wrong about this mission.
The damned ants were telepathic, or empathic, or group-minded, or somesuch. You’d think somebody would have thought of that.
But you’d think the brass would think, just once in a while, about something besides the bottom line.
Of course, people never set out to screw up. They just set out to win in their terms. The problem came when those terms weren’t terms on which everyone involved could win.
Right now, winning in McMurtry’s terms meant calling for pickup somewhere that didn’t get himself and his automated dust-off craft hosed down along with the rest of Portu Prince.
* * *
“Ants,” said Ace Baldridge with a shudder, pulling his big arms in to encircle his chest. His dog tags jittered on their chain. as he shook his head. “Uh-uh. I hate bugs. I got this thing about bugs. Come on, Sally, don’t put me into this. You can find somebody else.”
The ONI officer shook her head at Baldridge pityingly. “I’m sorry, Ace, I really am. I need you. And I’ve got you.” She tapped a disk against the bulkhead. “You and I are the only two people on this ship who are cleared for McMurtry’s verbal debrief. I had enough trouble getting any regular army officer cleared for this.”
Ace Baldridge sat up and flexed his arms over his head, gripping both wrists with his hands. The gesture was one which betrayed a long, unconscious familiarity with the confined spaces of aerospace fighter-bombers.
“You’re telling me that the fucking regional commander of fucking Special Operations Command had to be specially cleared to hear one of his own people’s reports?”
“That’s what I’m telling you, Colonel. Now, you want in on this bug thing, or not?”
Baldridge shifted uncomfortably, hands still over his head. His triceps jumped. “You said ‘direct contact with the ants.’ I’m really not up for a pow-wow with bugs.”
“Direct contact may not be the talking kind,” said the woman from the Office of Naval Intelligence. “We’re having an interagency meeting, with your single sergeant as our briefing officer. At the end of that meeting, everybody involved does whatever’s necessary—personally, to surgically solve this problem before it spreads. Now, are you up for it?”
“Why didn’t you say that in the first place?”
She’d scared him, wanting to have this ‘private talk’ in the cramped cockpit of one of the fighter-bombers in the big carrier’s hold. Security, she’d said.
Sally Holden was a significant power on the carrier ASS Hollywood, not simply because she held Commander’s rank. Everybody knew how much money there was in the Holden family, how many Holdens had been senators, how much stock in Aristan Military Industries the Holdens had.
She was in line to head ONI. And that made her really significant. So when Sally wanted to hunker down in a fighter-bomber’s C41 cockpit to have a chat where she could control security, you wondered if the world was ending.
Bugs. Ace Baldridge was forty-four years old and he’d hated bugs for at least forty of those years with a pathological hatred that sprung from an uncontrollable fear. His mother had been bitten by some kind of bug and died when he was very young, on a colony world that later was abandoned for reasons that were still classified.
Ace had been making worlds safe for human colonization for his entire adult life, and he always started with defoliants. And followed that with bug spray. And had managed to get a special bug repellant for his Special Forces troops that nobody in the regular army had. All because he hated bugs. He sure hoped that whatever McMurtry had to say about these ants was something that didn’t involve dancing cheek to cheek with one.
Sally looked at him critically. “Are we finished with the calisthenics?”
He was still flexing and relaxing his arm muscles. “It relaxes me.”
“So would a ten-year old Scotch, I’ll wager. Let’s go up to my office and have one.”
“You brought me all the way down here for just a yea or nay?”
Sally Holden looked at him out of the corner of one green eye. “Ace, I want to be sure you understand what’s about to happen. Once you’re in, there’s no going back.”
“I don’t need a mother, Sally. I had one. Did everybody else get this private pep talk?”
She was beautiful and she was powerful, and he’d slept with her before he’d realized how powerful, beautiful women could mess with your life. Then he’d stopped sleeping with her, because all of a sudden he stopped getting ground missions.
He’d never wanted to be too valuable to lose.
Now she was doing it again. And he’d nearly let her get away with it—seduce him into it—because he hated bugs, and because he knew she could get him out of whatever this was. He could use Sally’s clout as a shield between him and anything he didn’t want to do.
Now he understood why they were down here, in the little fighter-bomber. “You’re doing it again,” he said warningly, letting his arms fall. His hands twisted in his lap. “You want to get laid, I can handle that—it’s been a long time. But not the rest.”
“Before you say that, look at this.”
She leaned forward and put a disk in a slot. The fighter-bomber had five screens between the copilot and pilot’s stations.
The data came up as video on the screen at the bottom of the console’s T-shaped configuration. Ace Baldridge involuntarily sucked in his breath.
Damn. Ants. Lots of ants. The hair on his arms rose. His skin turned to gooseflesh. He watched the massacre in silence. Then he said, “That’s Portu Prince, right? Or was?”
Had to be, if McMurtry was the briefer for the upcoming meeting.
“That’s right. Russell’s people got their butts chewed out there, good. Only one came back, Mc—”
“—Murtry.” McMurtry would always come back. If you had a team with twelve McMurtrys in it, you could pack up and go home and wait for the mares to foal.
“So that’s how come I hadn’t heard anything.” Russell, from the intelligence side, had borrowed an SOG team for something in Portu Prince. Since it came up through Sally, Ace had signed off on it, no questions asked.
Now he was getting back one guy, McMurtry, a sick stomach, a spine full of chills, and a very incendiary situation with the Hothri.
“That’s how come. The Hothri hosed down a whole town, and then kept going. They haven’t stopped yet, on Portu, as far as we can determine.”
“So we stop them.”
“Any idea how, without starting an interstellar war?”
“Sally, it’s too late for that. When the senate sees this footage—”
“Nobody sees this but us. And the rest in the briefing. We started this, Ace—Michaels’ team had a mission definition which touched off this result.”
“Terrific. Still, we stop it.”
“How?”
“Blow the Hothri ships, here and now—all of them. Nothing gets out of Portu orbit.” Ace shrugged. Women never wanted to get right to the nitty-gritty. In war, there were occasions when it was counterproductive to engage in foreplay, no matter how clear it was to you that justifications were going to be important when committees convened, after the fact, to study what you’d done.
“I can’t just authorize—”
“We can, together. Don’t brief the others.” Out here, Ace Baldridge was the equivalent of a Joint Chief. Sally represented all of ONI’s muscle. If they didn’t let the alert status get contemplative, didn’t even think about looking for a quorum, they could react. “If we wait, we’ll be impotent.”
“It’s Russell’s team,” she reminded him.
“It’s my team,” he reminded her.
“Let’s go listen to McMurtry. Maybe we’re both overreacting.”
“You can’t overreact to that many dead noncombatants,” Ace said, but either she didn’t hear him, or she didn’t care to hear him. She pulled her disk, shut down the flight deck electronics, and palmed open the fighter-bomber’s hatch.
Once that was done, there was nothing to say: words bounced around the huge bay of the carrier like photons; you never knew where any single one might end up.
* * *
Sally Holden wanted to retch, once she’d seen McMurtry face to face and watched the record he’d made on Portu while listening to his verbal briefing.
When all that was left to watch was the rescue and dust-off, McMurtry said, “That’s really it, sirs.”
The lights came up. Everybody blinked. Russell, boneless in civilian clothes, was picking his teeth with a toothpick from his survival knife.
Ace was sitting backwards in one of the briefing room chairs, performing some arcane isometric ritual.
The ship’s captain was sipping tea and tapping his stylus on the keyboard in front of him.
“So, given the foregoing,” Sally said dully, “how do we respond?”
Russell raised his fine, graying head and stared at her for an instant before he said, “McMurtry, you did a fine job, getting back here with this record. We’re sorry about your loss. You want to sit in on this, it’s fine with us—you’re our situation expert.”
She should have said those things. She blushed. Russell never dropped a stitch, on duty. Sometimes she thought she wasn’t in his league. He thought so all the time. ONI wasn’t professional enough for the civilian intelligence component’s liking. And Russell was the representative of that component: he was everything Arista wanted its best and brightest to be, only he was a little bit more.
“Thanks, sir,” said McMurtry. “I just wanta go down the next time, if we’re going to even the score.”
“You can and we are,” said Russell positively, shifting the toothpick with his tongue. He was one of those big, fair men that aged beautifully, all size and sinew and testosterone—a born leader, Sally’s father would have said. “How about your personal take on these ants?”
Russell took things personally. And she could tell from the way his face was planed with tension that this was no exception.
“My take is, we just started somethin’ that ain’t gonna finish unless there’s none of us or none of them,” said McMurtry, shifting from foot to foot. “They were too quick. They’ve got some kind of herd instinct. They’re not going to cool out and walk away.“
“Neither are we,” Sally said, regaining control of the briefing as best she could. “Captain, what can you give us for odds of success if we try to take out every Hothri vessel in orbit, within twelve hours?”
“With or without communications jamming?” the captain wanted to know.
“Jamming should have started when McMurtry’s data reached this vessel,“ Russell critiqued softly, looking at his toothpick. “Too late now to be effective.”
Sally shot a look at Ace. Baldridge’s hands were white on the chair. “Ace? You haven’t said anything yet.”
“I keep thinking that I want to know who’s bright idea it was to record an Aristan picking a fight with a Hothri trading party. Was that supposed to make it okay that we killed three of their people? How the fuck did you expect them to react, Russell?”
“I didn’t cut these orders, Baldridge. Homeworld thought up this stunt. Ask Holden which of her father’s friends thought that, if the Hothri were to lose face and a few bodies, they’d cut and run, leaving Portu Prince for Arista to loot.“
“Sally?”
“I can’t tell you anything like that, Ace. You should know better than to ask.”
McMurtry shifted again, then slid onto a bulkhead.
“McMurtry, something to add?” Sally said.
“I . . . don’t think I belong here. Maybe I should go see that this data gets shunted back to Arista . . .”
Sally was about to say he needn’t worry, but Russell stood up. “I’ll go with you. If the Hothri don’t confine their hostilities to the planet’s surface, we’ll want this data in the hands of the senate . . .”
“In the hands of your shop, you mean,” Sally said.
Ace said, “If you send that back, now, we won’t be able to do anything about this until we get orders on how to proceed. And you know it, Russell.”
“I don’t know any such thing. Maybe you people have to wait for permission to wet your pants, but I can piss myself just fine on my own out here.” The big civilian turned. “Come on, McMurtry, let’s go do it.”
“Russell!”
Russell turned, his face bland-looking if you didn’t know what those planes meant, so carefully arranged to show no emotion.
“You’re not going anywhere yet,” Sally said.
“That’s right. I’d like your copy of the data. I want to class it so high, and compartment it so deep, that only three wizards at supergrade level’ll be able to look at it, and that only after they’ve entered a clean room.”
“I—”
It was Russell’s operation. His neck. He was telling her that he knew that, was accepting it, and could keep the blame from affecting the rest of them.
“Yes, all right.” She gave McMurtry’s data to him. He took it and, with an arm over McMurtry’s shoulders, left the briefing room.
Nobody said anything until the doors snapped shut again and the dogs shot home.
“Okay, where does that leave us?” the captain wanted to know.
“Ace?”
“Mounting a sterilizing operation, starting from orbit.” Ace shrugged. “Can we shoot down anything that comes up off Portu? Blanket jam their coms? Keep ‘em bottled up?”
“For a time. If I deploy all my assets, including kinetic kill smart mines and telerobotic orbital sweepers.”
“Do that,” Sally said. “If you will, Captain.”
“That won’t help on the ground.”
“On the ground,” Ace said, “we’ve got to get some kind of bug spray working. It’s our only chance. Something that bonds with methane and kills the bugs, while leaving the humans alone.”
“Chemical/biological weapons are in violation of every—” Sally began, and stopped.
“I know, sweetie. I just want us to live long enough to face court martials.”
Ace grinned at her.
She smiled back.
The captain said, “I wish the colonel wasn’t right, but he is.”
“You bet I’m right. And, unless I’m mistaken, we’re going to be one vehicle short. If I know Russell, now that he’s got that sergeant of mine and the record of what happened in Portu Prince, the two of them are down in the jump bay picking out a two-man scout that will get them home to Arista as soon as they can get cleared for separation.”
“We’ve got to stop them,” Sally said, getting to her feet.
“Why?” Ace wanted to know. “Don’t you think that somebody ought to be personally carrying word home about what happened here, in case these ants are better at thinking like us than we are at thinking like them?”
The captain said, “So, bottom line, you think you’re going to take your people back onto the surface, with whatever chemical agent we can come up with, Ace?”
“Bottom line, I don’t see any other way.”
“Well,” Sally said, trying to talk without her voice thickening, to look at the two men without tears overwhelming her desperate attempt not to shed them. “Let’s get to it, gentlemen. I’ll take the coms. My intel contingent will give you at least a few hours of fratricide-free communications while the Hothri systems are—I promise—useless.”
“Right,” said the carrier’s captain. “We’ll count on that. And we’ll coordinate the freqs for all the telerobotic hunter-killers, so that we can give you a clear orbital path and good drop zones, Ace. Don’t figure on deploying for at least six hours: it’ll take that long for me to get your spacelane’s drop-windows cleared.”
“Great. I’ll go see if anybody in Special Weapons can make me a bug killer we can spray. Save me some tactical fighters. I’ll need at least ten first-stage-to-orbit vehicles with nozzles where their cannon used to be.”
“No problem,” said the captain. “Just be sure you find something to spray through those nozzles that’ll kill ants, but not children, or we might as well self-destruct right now and save ourselves some grief.”
“Must be something,” Ace said.
“Let me see if my people can help you find it,” Sally said, knowing, as everyone else here knew, that they were just going through the motions.
Barring a miracle, every one of them was walking dead. To make things worse, they’d just witnessed the start of a war that would kill millions, on both sides, before it ended.
* * *
“God, I wish we hadn’t done that now,” Sally said, getting up from beside Ace, beautiful and naked in the subdued lighting of her cabin.
“I’m glad we did. Maybe you’all up here’ll make it through. Maybe you’ll have pity on a poor dead soldier and give me a posthumous son—”
A pillow hit him in the face.
“You’re a morose, manipulative bastard, you know that? Go sell it to the sperm bank.”
He might have, if he really believed that the carrier had any more chance of getting out of here alive than he did of getting down onto the planet, and off, alive.
When the real shooting started, there was no way in creation that a few paltry humans were going to fend off the fury of those ants, once aroused.
He kept trying to tell himself that he shouldn’t go groundside, but he wanted to go. You had to confront your fears. You couldn’t send men on a suicide mission, while you sat safe in orbit above their heads. You couldn’t say, “Yep, that was a suicide mission, all right.” Not when you knew you were going to get just as dead waiting around to count the bodies.
She came into his arms. “Maybe we could jump out of here, the way Russell and McMurtry did . . . ”
There’d been one free throw—one surprise exit, one shot at getting home. “Russell’s quick. He’s good. He’ll probably make it. But the ants’ll be waiting for us to try it, now. They’re alerted.”
“So why didn’t you say something?” She was girlishly lovely in her cabin’s low lighting. All Daddy’s money wasn’t going to help her now. She knew it. He knew it. And she knew he was impressed with how she was holding up.
“It’s been nice knowing you,” he said. “You’ll come back from there.”
“Yeah, probably. But will you still be here when I do?” They’d done a count of the Hothri ships. Unless the carrier’s captain could mount a surprise attack to beat all surprise attacks, there was no way that Aristan battle management could muster any force or counterforce up to handling the ants’ group-mind response capability.
This ship, everybody on it, and everybody who went groundside, were equally doomed. Barring a miracle.
“Do you believe in miracles?” he asked her.
“Only today,” she said.
“How’s that?” he asked.
“That McMurtry got back at all—that was a miracle.” He thought about it, running his hands up her round, white arms, and then over and across one of her round, white breasts. “Yeah, you’re right. Okay, do you believe in two miracles?”
“On one day?” She grinned wickedly. “Well, I got you back into bed, so I guess I’ll have to say yes to that.”
“You what—?”
Then he was sorry he’d asked, embarrassed. Women always confounded him. “Damn,” he mumbled at last, “if I’d known you were that hard up—”
“We’re both hard up, Ace.” She settled into his lap. “I still think it might be worth it to get a Portuan who speaks good Hothri and try to talk our way out of this—even pay reparations.”
“Is that what you want me to do?”
He really wanted to use his bug spray. He had his heart set on it.
“Yes. That’s what I want. Even knowing that, if I’m wrong, then we’ve lost whatever element of surprise we have left,” she said dreamily.
“Yeah, but I’m not so sure—”
Bang.
The first salvo of the Hothri attack on the carrier blew their compartment to smithereens, and settled that argument for eternity.
* * *
Human vermin, like any other vermin, had one saving grace: once they were dead, you could eat them. Or so the Hothri command structure consoled itself as it continued firing upon its self-appointed enemy.
The Hothri’s second salvo, from a closing globular formation of dreadnoughts, staggered so that no friendly fire would hit a Hothri vessel, ripped the Aristan carrier apart at midships.
The cleanup, ordered by the Hothri command structure in order to make sure that the enemy did not have time to warn its bases, took less time than expected.
When all of the human aggressors were dead, on the planet and around it, the Hothri turned up the shipboard infrared and let the crew bask for a while, as was the right of the victorious.
In the command echelons, some considered the possibility that one of the enemy spacecraft had escaped early on. But the command males and females were already twisting in the hot red light of celebration, and these could not be convinced that their victory was anything but complete.
Victory complete, peace assured. War was, after all, a thing to be avoided. War ravaged economies, destroyed trading cultures. Witness what had happened on the planet below.
All that was left of their human trading partners was fit only for food. Hothri cryoengineers were readied for debarkation to the planet’s surface. There they would attack the task of preparing to transport all that food shipboard.
A way must be found to store all the human meat. The Hothri did not waste food. It was a sin against nature to waste food. It was also a sin against the species that had attacked the Hothri. A dead enemy was no longer an enemy.
A dead species, even one that breathed only barely-palatable atmosphere, was still protein.
Some way must be found to take the rusty taste out of so much valuable protein. Otherwise, nature would be offended. Nature was always offended when its bounty was misused. A way would be found to make this dead flesh of human enemies palatable—if not to the Hothri themselves, then to some other trading partner.
Of course, no thing capable of life and death was ever truly useless. Fertilizer was in demand on some planets. Calcium was highly sought in other places. One of the Hothri recollected a race which liked to carve bone and had carved all its big mammals to extinction.
Some use would be found for the bodies of the enemy. This was certain. That way, the slain Hothri’s souls would not be offended when they returned through new eggs to life.
Not that the conquered planet itself couldn’t be useful. Breeding stock to repopulate it was now the most pressing priority to the Hothri—Hothri breeding stock. It was a lucky thing that, wherever these human monsters must be eradicated, Hothri could thrive. Once planets were sterilized of this now-hereditary enemy, Hothri colonizers could be brought in to settle. Thus, eventually, trading would resume.
In the meantime, there was much to be gained by collecting what was left of the enemy artifacts and studying them. Even though peace was at hand here and now, wherever and whenever Hothri met the hideous human enemy, war would begin again. Whenever Hothri met human, if that human was living, that human would be considered a hideous enemy.
It was important to learn as much about the enemy, and his capabilities, as possible before man and Hothri met again
The Hothri sent out salvage parties to bring back every shard of human equipment that had escaped total destruction. Soon the Hothri flotilla was as busy as a hive, with workers coming and going, storing bits of enemy and bits of enemy equipment.
The command elements watched, lazy in the bright glow of infrared luxury—the prerogative of command—as order was restored above the world they had just taken as their own.
It was not important, they told themselves, whistling softly, touching heads and scratching eyes, if one of the enemy had escaped. The advantage, they told themselves, was still theirs.
They had met this enemy once and defeated it easily. The scoured planet below was proof that, if confrontation came again, nature was on the side of the Hothri.
* * *
They were still in the Portu light cone when McMurtry saw the flare on his topo monitor.
He yelled, “Russell!”
Russell, who was readying for the jump out of Portu spacetime, yelled back, “What, damn you? Can’t you see I’m busy?”
McMurtry was out of his web harness by then, over at the bulkhead.
They were approaching half-C, where spacetime was breachable. Anybody but a crazy man would be sitting in his goddamn acceleration couch, not bucking all that G-force in order to roam around a flight deck where everything, including people, ought to have been battened down tight.
Russell turned from the waist, very carefully. You didn’t try to tum your neck at these speeds. Spacetime affects and G-forces could combine with human stubbornness to snap your neck and kill you, if you were very unlucky. Most of the time, you just bought yourself one hell of a headache and some extremely sore muscles.
But there was McMurtry, on his feet. Leaning against the bulkhead.
Russell carefully reached up and pushed back his helmet enough to really hear what the sluggish sound waves were carrying toward him in real-time: thump; thump; thump.
Russell had probably heard it through his com link; he’d just ignored it.
Now he couldn’t: McMurtry was slowly, methodically, pounding his head against the bulkhead wall next to the expert-system rackmounts.
“McMurtry, sit the hell down. You’re going to kill yourself.”
Of course, that didn’t work. Russell had seen men do lots of crazy things during after-action stress-outs, but he’d never seen a man with quite as much hysterical strength as McMurtry was displaying.
At least it was aimed at McMurtry himself, and not at Russell. Russell had been leading men into and out of tight spots for most of his professional life. He ought to be able to talk McMurtry down—at least talk him back into his seat so that Russell could execute the jump.
But you never knew.
So Russell slipped a stunner out of his couch’s map pocket and chambered a wire-guided round before he said, “Come on, McMurtry. Sit down. We’ll talk this through together.”
Thump. “They’re dead.” Thump. “They’re all dead.”
“On the carrier, you mean? Probably. I know what you saw. I saw it—the topo flash—too. They’re dead and we’re not. I save your ass, and this is the thanks I get.” Russell knew he was taking a terrible risk. Special Forces people grew unhealthily close to their teammates on long hauls. And McMurtry had been out a long time. “Maybe I should have left you to die with your buddies,” he continued when he got no response, “but I didn’t want to. Know why?”
Thump.
Oh, great. “Because we need you, alive and well, to back up what’s on that disk for any number of senators and industrialists who flat aren’t going to want to believe what’s on that disk unless there’s a man there to look them straight in the eye and say, ‘I was there. I did it. I saw it. We’re in deep shit, gentlemen. You have my word on it.’”
Thump.
Russell actually considered trying to get out of his acceleration couch at this speed—or slowing down enough that doing so made sense. But that was crazy. As far as Russell was concerned, he was still fleeing possible Hothri pursuit.
“Now, look, McMurtry, if you’re not going to help me with my problem on Arista, you might just as well have stayed back there and died. But I can’t let you stop me from making the jump. Somebody’s got to get word home. Don’t you think the human race deserves some decent intelligence—just this once, when it really counts?”
Russell held his breath.
For a long time, McMurtry didn’t say anything. But the thumping had stopped.
Then, when Russell, looking to his AI for guidance, saw that he had sixty seconds to either prepare his dual-flow engines to jump or throttle back into normal mode and try another run up to speed, McMurtry said, “Yeah, okay.”
And the brawny special forces sergeant made his way carefully back to the copilot’s couch, sat in it and strapped his webbing on, all as if he wasn’t bucking some serious G-force to do it, even with grav-adjust.
Russell let out a deep breath. He was no hot dog pilot. If not for the expert system, he’d probably have blown them both to hell by now, trying to hover at the jumpspeed threshold.
“You know, McMurtry, you had me worried.” Carefully turning his whole torso from the waist, Russell looked over at the SF sergeant.
McMurtry had a bunch of hematomas on his forehead that made him look like he had a case of volcanic acne, but otherwise, he looked better than Russell had hoped.
Tears were streaming openly down the sergeant’s face—tears of grief for lost comrades.
Men who cried didn’t run amok and kill everybody in their general vicinity. Russell took a deep breath and said, “It’s okay, man. They did great. You did great. We’ll find a way to make it worth it. This was bound to happen, sooner or later, the way those ants behaved: they were ready for you guys. Waiting for a pretext. Trust me. This is my area of expertise . . .”
“Yeah,“ McMurtry was nodding through unashamed tears. “We’ll warn everybody. We’ll get prepared. It’ll be . . .”
Russell pushed the button and even McMurtry couldn’t talk under the onslaught of Dirac-transforms that popped them out of relativistic spacetime into an expert-calibrated n-space.
“. . . worth it, if we save everybody,” McMurtry continued when he could, as if the breaths in one dimension and the breaths in another were connected.
Russell said, “Look, intelligence is the only edge we’ve got: the kind between our ears, and the kind we can give them back home. You’ve got to hold on with me, McMurtry. We can, and will, win this eventually.”
“How can you say that?” McMurtry wanted to know.
“Because we’re men, damn it. We think for ourselves. We reason. We don’t just react like those ants do—some huge knee-jerk response to stimuli.”
“You saw what they did to us back there . . .”
“We walked right into it. You step on a snake, it’s going to bite you. You tromp a hill full of red ants, they get pissed. Little ants didn’t overwhelm mankind. Big ants won’t either.”
McMurtry was palming his face dry. “I should have died with my—”
There it was. Russell wasn’t going to let that one get started. “Hey, soldier. You got a job to do. You aren’t responsible for your orders, or command screwups that gave you mission parameters that were bound to get people killed. You were responsible to do the mission and survive if possible, right?”
“Right,” said McMurtry with a sniffle, Rough-hewn SF sergeants didn’t cry enough that they knew what to do when their noses started to run. McMurtry wiped his hand under his nose. “But you know you can die in performance of—”
“Some sensible damn duty, which this wasn’t. Nobody asked for suicide commandos on this. Nobody with brains does that, ever. There’s nothing that isn’t survivable if it’s planned by the right people and executed by the right people—nothing that should be planned and executed. Got me?”
“You civilian intel—”
“Yeah, we’re nasty. We play dirty. We know we’re good and we’re proud that we stay alive by breaking the rules. You bet. And if you’ll let me, I’m going to teach you lots of things you didn’t learn in jump school, mister. Enough things that you can fight this war to the finish and end up, alive, with your foot on a Hothri nest, if that’s what you want.”
“That’s what I want, all right,” said McMurtry with a bleak grin.
Predictable, Russell thought. But he said, “Okay, we’ve got a deal: you brief ‘em till they cry for mercy, and I’ll get you over on my side of the playing field, where one guy can do the darnage of a hundred grunts, no matter how special, and live to bitch about the assholes who sit around wringing their hands over the nasty way we go about winning. You have me on your scope, sergeant?”
“Yep,” said McMurtry. “I’d join up with the devil himself, long as I get to kill ants.”
“I promise you, you’ll have all the ants you can stomp, and then some.”
Russell flipped his earpiece back over his right ear and faced front. He still had to get this piece-of-crap ship docked, and get McMurtry, safe and sound, into the right briefing rooms. But he’d do everything he’d promised the marine he would.
In Russell’s line of work, where everything was off the record and nonattributable, your word was your bond.
And McMurtry was the only weapon that Russell had at hand to make sure that the human race didn’t get caught with its pants down.
Again.
But he’d been living by his wits long enough to get a good gut take on the situation. And his gut was telling him that McMurtry’s eyewitness account of what had happened back there in Portu Prince was going to be enough.
And that was all you ever asked of the universe: a fighting chance, a second of warning—just enough.
Once more he looked at the marine, hoping McMurtry understood that, even if he did feel like he’d started this whole war all by his lonesome, he was still the only man who could whip Arista into readiness.
And readiness was what counted. More, even, than intelligence itself.
The AI beeped and Russell flipped through his heads-up displays until he found the topo map it wanted to show him.
This way to Arista, Mr. Russell, he could almost hear the AI whisper. Time to save the world.
If you can. If they’ll let you. If you can convince them.
The shaken marine sergeant would go a long way toward convincing anyone who saw him.
The rest was a matter of putting things in terms that the Aristan senate could understand: wounded global pride, financial risk, possible profit.
And, of course, personal survival.
Russell hadn’t gotten this far—alive—by under-estimating the lure of personal survival. To anyone.
On his side of the house, the civilian side, the professionals knew who and what they were, and what good they were to Arista.
Other people thought about manifest destiny and history and the Aristan ethic.
Russell’s kind thought about survival. So that was what they called themselves, among themselves-the survivors.
They survived administrations. They survived general staffs. They survived wars and famines. They survived purges and peaces,
If he could just show McMurtry that one man, well placed, with good intelligence and experience, could make a difference, then McMurtry’s life was going to make one hell of a difference to Arista.
And to McMurtry himself.
Sometime during the flight home, while Russell was getting in line for a parking orbit, McMurtry leaned over and grabbed his arm.
Since it was Russell’s throttle arm, he took the touch very seriously.
He froze and said, slowly pulling his headset back off his ear, “Yeah, McMurtry. What can I do for you now?”
“I just want to thank you, sir—Mr. Russell—not only for saving me in the first place, but for talking me down.”
“Don’t sweat it, McMurtry. I have every intention of taking that little favor out of your hide for the next two or three months.”
McMurtry grinned and let him go.
It occurred to Russell, as he resumed throttling down, that McMurtry might not know that Russell never lied unless it was absolutely necessary.
After all, safeguarding the truth was part of Russell’s job.
And the truth was about to come home to Arista in a big way, in the person of a Special Forces sergeant named McMurtry, just in time to keep the human race from blundering into Armageddon one more time.