“Hold fire, hold it!” Cortez stood up. “We want to have something left—second platoon, follow me.” He strode out toward the smoldering corpses, laser-finger pointed out front, obscene divining rod pulling him toward the carnage…I felt my gorge rising and knew that all the lurid training tapes, all the horrible deaths in training accidents, hadn’t prepared me for this sudden reality…that I had a magic wand that I could point at a life and make it a smoking piece of half-raw meat; I wasn’t a soldier nor ever wanted to be one nor ever would want—
“Okay, seventh, come on up.” While we were walking toward them, one of the creatures moved, a tiny shudder, and Cortez flicked the beam of his laser over it with an almost negligent gesture. It made a hand-deep gash across the creature’s middle. It died, like the others, without emitting a sound.
They were not quite as tall as humans, but wider in girth. They were covered with dark green, almost black, fur—white curls where the laser had singed. They appeared to have three legs and an arm. The only ornament to their shaggy heads was a mouth, a wet black orifice filled with flat black teeth. They were thoroughly repulsive, but their worst feature was not a difference from human beings, but a similarity…Whenever the laser had opened a body cavity, milk-white glistening veined globes and coils of organs spilled out, and their blood was dark clotting red.
“Rogers, take a look. Taurans or not?”
Rogers knelt by one of the disemboweled creatures and opened a flat plastic box, filled with glittering dissecting tools. She selected a scalpel. “One way we might be able to find out.” Doc Wilson watched over her shoulder as she methodically slit the membrane covering several organs.
“Here.” She held up a blackish fibrous mass between two fingers, a parody of daintiness through all that armor.
“So?”
“It’s grass, Sergeant. If the Taurans eat the grass and breathe the air, they certainly found a planet remarkably like their home.” She tossed it away. “They’re animals, Sergeant, just fucken animals.”
“I don’t know,” Doc Wilson said. “Just because they walk around on all fours, threes maybe, and eat grass…”
“Well, let’s check out the brain.” She found one that had been hit in the head and scraped the superficial black char from the wound. “Look at that.”
It was almost solid bone. She tugged and ruffled the hair all over the head of another one. “What the hell does it use for sensory organs? No eyes, or ears, or…” She stood up.
“Nothing in that fucken head but a mouth and ten centimeters of skull. To protect nothing, not a fucken thing.”
“If I could shrug, I’d shrug,” the doctor said. “It doesn’t prove anything—a brain doesn’t have to look like a mushy walnut and it doesn’t have to be in the head. Maybe that skull isn’t bone, maybe that’s the brain, some crystal lattice…”
“Yeah, but the fucken stomach’s in the right place, and if those aren’t intestines I’ll eat—”
“Look,” Cortez said, “this is real interesting, but all we need to know is whether that thing’s dangerous, then we’ve gotta move on; we don’t have all—”
“They aren’t dangerous,” Rogers began. “They don’t—”
“Medic! DOC!” Somebody back at the firing line was waving his arms. Doc sprinted back to him, the rest of us following.
“What’s wrong?” He had reached back and unclipped his medical kit on the run.
“It’s Ho. She’s out.”
Doc swung open the door on Ho’s biomedical monitor. He didn’t have to look far. “She’s dead.”
“Dead?” Cortez said. “What the hell—”
“Just a minute.” Doc plugged a jack into the monitor and fiddled with some dials on his kit. “Everybody’s biomed readout is stored for twelve hours. I’m running it backwards, should be able to—there!”
“What?”
“Four and a half minutes ago—must have been when you opened fire—Jesus!”
“Well?”
“Massive cerebral hemorrhage. No…” He watched the dials. “No…warning, no indication of anything out of the ordinary; blood pressure up, pulse up, but normal under the circumstances…nothing to…indicate—” He reached down and popped her suit. Her fine oriental features were distorted in a horrible grimace, both gums showing. Sticky fluid ran from under her collapsed eyelids, and a trickle of blood still dripped from each ear. Doc Wilson closed the suit back up.
“I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s as if a bomb went off in her skull.”
“Oh fuck,” Rogers said, “she was Rhine-sensitive, wasn’t she.”
“That’s right,” Cortez sounded thoughtful. “All right, everybody listen up. Platoon leaders, check your platoons and see if anybody’s missing, or hurt. Anybody else in seventh?”
“I…I’ve got a splitting headache, Sarge,” Lucky said.
Four others had bad headaches. One of them affirmed that he was slightly Rhine-sensitive. The others didn’t know.
“Cortez, I think it’s obvious,” Doc Wilson said, “that we should give these…monsters wide berth, especially shouldn’t harm any more of them. Not with five people susceptible to whatever apparently killed Ho.”
“Of course, God damn it, I don’t need anybody to tell me that.
We’d better get moving. I just filled the captain in on what happened; he agrees that we’d better get as far away from here as we can, before we stop for the night.
“Let’s get back in formation and continue on the same bearing. Fifth platoon, take over point; second, come back to the rear. Everybody else, same as before.”
“What about Ho?” Lucky asked.
“She’ll be taken care of. From the ship.”
After we’d gone half a klick, there was a flash and rolling thunder. Where Ho had been came a wispy luminous mushroom cloud boiling up to disappear against the gray sky.
Thirteen
We stopped for the “night”—actually, the sun wouldn’t set for another seventy hours—atop a slight rise some ten klicks from where we had killed the aliens. But they weren’t aliens, I had to remind myself—we were.
Two platoons deployed in a ring around the rest of us, and we flopped down exhausted. Everybody was allowed four hours’ sleep and had two hours’ guard duty.
Potter came over and sat next to me. I chinned her frequency.
“Hi, Marygay.”
“Oh, William,” her voice over the radio was hoarse and cracking. “God, it’s so horrible.” “It’s over now—” “I killed one of them, the first instant, I shot it right in the, in the…”
I put my hand on her knee. The contact had a plastic click and I jerked it back, visions of machines embracing, copulating. “Don’t feel singled out, Marygay; whatever guilt there is, is…belongs evenly to all of us…but a triple portion for Cor—”
“You privates quit jawin’ and get some sleep. You both pull guard in two hours.”
“Okay, Sarge.” Her voice was so sad and tired I couldn’t bear it. I felt if I could only touch her, I could drain off the sadness like ground wire draining current, but we were each trapped in our own plastic world—
“G’night, William.”
“Night.” It’s almost impossible to get sexually excited inside a suit, with the relief tube and all the silver chloride sensors poking you, but somehow this was my body’s response to the emotional impotence, maybe remembering more pleasant sleeps with Marygay, maybe feeling that in the midst of all this death, personal death could be very soon, cranking up the procreative derrick for one last try…lovely thoughts like this. I fell asleep and dreamed that I was a machine, mimicking the functions of life, creaking and clanking my clumsy way through a world, people too polite to say anything but giggling behind my back, and the little man who sat inside my head pulling the levers and clutches and watching the dials, he was hopelessly mad and was storing up hurts for the day—
“Mandella—wake up, goddammit, your shift!”
I shuffled ove
r to my place on the perimeter to watch for god knows what…but I was so weary I couldn’t keep my eyes open. Finally I tongued a stimtab, knowing I’d pay for it later.
For over an hour I sat there, scanning my sector left, right, near, far, the scene never changing, not even a breath of wind to stir the grass.
Then suddenly the grass parted and one of the three-legged creatures was right in front of me. I raised my finger but didn’t squeeze.
“Movement!”
“Movement!”
“Jesus Chri—there’s one right—”
“HOLD YOUR FIRE! F’ shit’s sake don’t shoot!”
“Movement.”
“Movement.” I looked left and right, and as far as I could see, every perimeter guard had one of the blind, dumb creatures standing right in front of him.
Maybe the drug I’d taken to stay awake made me more sensitive to whatever they did. My scalp crawled and I felt a formless thing in my mind, the feeling you get when somebody has said something and you didn’t quite hear it, want to respond, but the opportunity to ask him to repeat it is gone.
The creature sat back on its haunches, leaning forward on the one front leg. Big green bear with a withered arm. Its power threaded through my mind, spiderwebs, echo of night terrors, trying to communicate, trying to destroy me, I couldn’t know.
“All right, everybody on the perimeter, fall back, slow. Don’t make any quick gestures…Anybody got a headache or anything?”
“Sergeant, this is Hollister.” Lucky.
“They’re trying to say something…I can almost…no, just…”
“All I can get is that they think we’re, think we’re…well, funny. They’re not afraid.” “You mean the one in front of you isn’t—” “No, the feeling comes from all of them, they’re all thinking the same thing. Don’t ask me how I know, I just do.”
“Maybe they thought it was funny, what they did to Ho.”
“Maybe. I don’t feel they’re dangerous. Just curious about us.”
“Sergeant, this is Bohrs.”
“Yeah.”
“The Taurans’ve been here at least a year—maybe they’ve learned how to communicate with these…overgrown teddy bears. They might be spying on us, might be sending back—”
“I don’t think they’d show themselves if that were the case,” Lucky said. “They can obviously hide from us pretty well when they want to.”
“Anyhow,” Cortez said, “if they’re spies, the damage has been done. Don’t think it’d be smart to take any action against them. I know you’d all like to see ’em dead for what they did to Ho, so would I, but we’d better be careful.”
I didn’t want to see them dead, but I’d just as soon not have seen them in any condition. I was walking backward slowly, toward the middle of camp. The creature didn’t seem disposed to follow. Maybe he just knew we were surrounded. He was pulling up grass with his arm and munching.
“Okay, all of you platoon leaders, wake everybody up, get a roll count. Let me know if anybody’s been hurt. Tell your people we’re moving out in one minute.”
I don’t know what Cortez had expected, but of course the creatures followed right along. They didn’t keep us surrounded; just had twenty or thirty following us all the time. Not the same ones, either. Individuals would saunter away, and new ones would join the parade. It was pretty obvious that they weren’t going to tire out.
We were each allowed one stimtab. Without it, no one could have marched an hour. A second pill would have been welcome after the edge started to wear off, but the mathematics of the situation forbade it; we were still thirty klicks from the enemy base, fifteen hours’ marching at the least. And though you could stay awake and energetic for a hundred hours on the tabs, aberrations of judgment and perception snowballed after the second one, until in extremis the most bizarre hallucinations would be taken at face value, and a person could fidget for hours deciding whether to have breakfast.
Under artificial stimulation, the company traveled with great energy for the first six hours, was slowing by the seventh, and ground to an exhausted halt after nine hours and nineteen kilometers. The teddy bears had never lost sight of us and, according to Lucky, had never stopped “broadcasting.” Cortez’s decision was that we would stop for seven hours, each platoon taking one hour of perimeter guard. I was never so glad to have been in the seventh platoon, as we stood guard the last shift and thus were able to get six hours of uninterrupted sleep.
In the few moments I lay awake after finally lying down, the thought came to me that the next time I closed my eyes could well be the last. And partly because of the drug hangover, mostly because of the past day’s horrors, I found that I really didn’t give a shit.
Fourteen
Our first contact with the Taurans came during my shift.
The teddy bears were still there when I woke up and replaced Doc Jones on guard. They’d gone back to their original formation, one in front of each guard position. The one who was waiting for me seemed a little larger than normal, but otherwise looked just like all the others. All the grass had been cropped where he was sitting, so he occasionally made forays to the left or right. But he always returned to sit right in front of me, you would say staring if he had had anything to stare with.
We had been facing each other for about fifteen minutes when Cortez’s voice rumbled:
“Awright everybody, wake up and get hid!”
I followed instinct and flopped to the ground and rolled into a tall stand of grass.
“Enemy vessel overhead.” His voice was almost laconic.
Strictly speaking, it wasn’t really overhead, but rather passing somewhat east of us. It was moving slowly, maybe a hundred klicks per hour, and looked like a broomstick surrounded by a dirty soap bubble. The creature riding it was a little more human-looking than the teddy bears, but still no prize. I cranked my image amplifier up to forty log two for a closer look.
He had two arms and two legs, but his waist was so small you could encompass it with both hands. Under the tiny waist was a large horseshoe-shaped pelvic structure nearly a meter wide, from which dangled two long skinny legs with no apparent knee joint. Above that waist his body swelled out again, to a chest no smaller than the huge pelvis. His arms looked surprisingly human, except that they were too long and undermuscled. There were too many fingers on his hands. Shoulderless, neckless. His head was a nightmarish growth that swelled like a goiter from his massive chest. Two eyes that looked like clusters of fish eggs, a bundle of tassles instead of a nose, and a rigidly open hole that might have been a mouth sitting low down where his Adam’s apple should have been. Evidently the soap bubble contained an amenable environment, as he was wearing absolutely nothing except his ridged hide, that looked like skin submerged too long in hot water, then dyed a pale orange. “He” had no external genitalia, but nothing that might hint of mammary glands. So we opted for the male pronoun by default.
Obviously, he either didn’t see us or thought we were part of the herd of teddy bears. He never looked back at us, but just continued in the same direction we were headed, .05 rad east of north.
“Might as well go back to sleep now, if you can sleep after looking at that thing. We move out at 04:35.” .
Because of the planet’s opaque cloud cover, there had been no way to tell, from space, what the enemy base looked like or how big it was. We only knew its position, the same way we knew the position the scoutships were supposed to land on. So it too could easily have been underwater, or underground.
But some of the drones were reconnaissance ships as well as decoys: and in their mock attacks on the base, one managed to get close enough to take a picture. Captain Stott beamed down a diagram of the place to Cortez—the only one with a visor in his suit—when we were five klicks from the base’s “radio” position. We stopped and he called all the platoon leaders in with the seventh platoon to confer. Two teddy bears loped in, too. We tried to ignore them.
“Okay, the captain se
nt down some pictures of our objective. I’m going to draw a map; you platoon leaders copy.” They took pads and styli out of their leg pockets, while Cortez unrolled a large plastic mat. He gave it a shake to randomize any residual charge, and turned on his stylus.
“Now, we’re coming from this direction.” He put an arrow at the bottom of the sheet. “First thing we’ll hit is this row of huts, probably billets or bunkers, but who the hell knows…Our initial objective is to destroy these buildings—the whole base is on a flat plain; there’s no way we could really sneak by them.”
“Potter here. Why can’t we jump over them?”
“Yeah, we could do that, and wind up completely surrounded, cut to ribbons. We take the buildings.
“After we do that…all I can say is that we’ll have to think on our feet. From the aerial reconnaissance, we can figure out the function of only a couple of buildings—and that stinks. We might wind up wasting a lot of time demolishing the equivalent of an enlisted-men’s bar, ignoring a huge logistic computer because it looks like…a garbage dump or something.”
“Mandella here,” I said. “Isn’t there a spaceport of some kind—seems to me we ought to…”
“I’ll get to that, damn it. There’s a ring of these huts all around the camp, so we’ve got to break through somewhere. This place’ll be closest, less chance of giving away our position before we attack.
“There’s nothing in the whole place that actually looks like a weapon. That doesn’t mean anything, though; you could hide a gigawatt laser in each of those huts.
“Now, about five hundred meters from the huts, in the middle of the base, we’ll come to this big flower-shaped structure.” Cortez drew a large symmetrical shape that looked like the outline of a flower with seven petals. “What the hell this is, your guess is as good as mine.
There’s only one of them, though, so we don’t damage it any more than we have to. Which means…we blast it to splinters if I think it’s dangerous.