The Forever War Page 23

  We had used more powerful nova bombs earlier in the war, but the degenerate matter used to fuel them was unstable in large quantities. The bombs had a tendency to explode while they were still inside the ship. Evidently the Taurans had the same problem—or they had copied the process from us in the first place—because they had also scaled down to nova bombs that used less than a hundred kilograms of degenerate matter. And they deployed them much the same way we did, the warhead separating into dozens of pieces as it approached the target, only one of which was the nova bomb.

  They would probably have a few bombs left over after they finished off Masaryk II and her retinue of fighters and drones. So it was likely that we were wasting time and energy in weapons practice.

  The thought did slip by my conscience that I could gather up eleven people and board the fighter we had hidden safe behind the stasis field. It was preprogrammed to take us back to Stargate.

  I even went to the extreme of making a mental list of the eleven, trying to think of eleven people who meant more to me than the rest. Turned out I’d be picking six at random.

  I put the thought away, though. We did have a chance, maybe a damned good one, even against a fully-armed cruiser. It wouldn’t be easy to get a nova bomb close enough to include us inside its kill-radius.

  Besides, they’d space me for desertion. So why bother?

  ~~~

  Spirits rose when one of Antopol’s drones knocked out the first Tauran cruiser. Not counting the ships left behind for planetary defense, she still had eighteen drones and two fighters. They wheeled around to intercept the second cruiser, by then a few light-hours away, still being harassed by fifteen enemy drones.

  One of the Tauran drones got her. Her ancillary crafts continued the attack, but it was a rout. One fighter and three drones fled the battle at maximum acceleration, looping up over the plane of the ecliptic, and were not pursued. We watched them with morbid interest while the enemy cruiser inched back to do battle with us. The fighter was headed back for Sade-138, to escape. Nobody blamed them. In fact, we sent them a farewell-good luck message; they didn’t respond, naturally, being zipped up in the tanks. But it would be recorded.

  It took the enemy five days to get back to the planet and be comfortably ensconced in a stationary orbit on the other side. We settled in for the inevitable first phase of the attack, which would be aerial and totally automated: their drones against our lasers. I put a force of fifty men and women inside the stasis field, in case one of the drones got through. An empty gesture, really; the enemy could just stand by and wait for them to turn off the field, fry them the second it flickered out.

  Charlie had a weird idea that I almost went for.

  “We could boobytrap the place.”

  “What do you mean?” I said. “This place is boobytrapped, out to twenty-five klicks.”

  “No, not the mines and such. I mean the base itself, here, underground.”

  “Go on.”

  “There are two nova bombs in that fighter.” He pointed at the stasis field through a couple of hundred meters of rock. “We can roll them down here, boobytrap them, then hide everybody in the stasis field and wait.”

  In a way it was tempting. It would relieve me from any responsibility for decision making, leave everything up to chance. “I don’t think it would work, Charlie.”

  He seemed hurt. “Sure it would.”

  “No, look. For it to work, you have to get every single Tauran inside the kill-radius before it goes off—but they wouldn’t all come charging in here once they breached our defenses. Least of all if the place seemed deserted. They’d suspect something, send in an advance party. And after the advance party set off the bombs—”

  “We’d be back where we started, yeah. Minus the base. Sorry.” I shrugged. “It was an idea. Keep thinking, Charlie.” I turned my attention back to the display, where the lopsided space war was in progress. Logically enough, the enemy wanted to knock out that one fighter overhead before he started to work on us. About all we could do was watch the red dots crawl around the planet and try to score. So far the pilot had managed to knock out all the drones; the enemy hadn’t sent any fighters after him yet.

  I’d given the pilot control over five of the lasers in our defensive ring. They couldn’t do much good, though. A gigawatt laser pumps out a billion kilowatts per second at a range of a hundred meters. A thousand klicks up, though, the beam was attenuated to ten kilowatts. Might do some damage if it hit an optical sensor. At least confuse things.

  “We could use another fighter. Or six.”

  “Use up the drones,” I said. We did have a fighter, of course, and a swabbie attached to us who could pilot it. It might turn out to be our only hope, if they got us cornered in the stasis field.

  “How far away is the other guy?” Charlie asked, meaning the fighter pilot who had turned tail. I cranked down the scale, and the green dot appeared at the right of the display. “About six light-hours.” He had two drones left, too near to him to show as separate dots, having expended one in covering his getaway. “He’s not accelerating any more, but he’s doing point nine gee.”

  “Couldn’t do us any good if he wanted to.” Need almost a month to slow down.

  At that low point, the light that stood for our own defensive fighter faded out. “Shit.”

  “Now the fun starts. Should I tell the troops to get ready, stand by to go topside?”

  “No…have them suit up, in case we lose air. But I expect it’ll be a little while before we have a ground attack.” I turned the scale up again. Four red dots were already creeping around the globe toward us.

  ~~~

  I got suited up and came back to Administration to watch the fireworks on the monitors.

  The lasers worked perfectly. All four drones converged on us simultaneously; were targeted and destroyed. All but one of the nova bombs went off below our horizon (the visual horizon was about ten kilometers away, but the lasers were mounted high and could target something at twice that distance). The bomb that detonated on our horizon had melted out a semicircular chunk that glowed brilliantly white for several minutes. An hour later, it was still glowing dull orange, and the ground temperature outside had risen to fifty degrees Absolute, melting most of our snow, exposing an irregular dark gray surface.

  The next attack was also over in a fraction of a second, but this time there had been eight drones, and four of them got within ten klicks. Radiation from the glowing craters raised the temperature to nearly 300 degrees. That was above the melting point of water, and I was starting to get worried. The fighting suits were good to over a thousand degrees, but the automatic lasers depended on low-temperature superconductors for their speed.

  I asked the computer what the lasers’ temperature limit was, and it printed out TR 398-734-009-265, “Some Aspects Concerning the Adaptability of Cryogenic Ordnance to Use in Relatively High-Temperature Environments,” which had lots of handy advice about how we could insulate the weapons if we had access to a fully-equipped armorer’s shop. It did note that the response time of automatic-aiming devices increased as the temperature increased, and that above some “critical temperature,” the weapons would not aim at all. But there was no way to predict any individual weapon’s behavior, other than to note that the highest critical temperature recorded was 790 degrees and the lowest was 420 degrees.

  Charlie was watching the display. His voice was flat over the suit’s radio. “Sixteen this time.”

  “Surprised?” One of the few things we knew about Tauran psychology was a certain compulsiveness about numbers, especially primes and powers of two.

  “Let’s just hope they don’t have 32 left.” I queried the computer on this; all it could say was that the cruiser had thus far launched a total of 44 drones and that some cruisers had been known to carry as many as 128.

  We had more than a half hour before the drones would strike. I could evacuate everybody to the stasis field, and they would be temporarily safe if one o
f the nova bombs got through. Safe, but trapped. How long would it take the crater to cool down, if three or four—let alone sixteen—of the bombs made it through? You couldn’t live forever in a fighting suit, even though it recycled everything with remorseless efficiency. One week was enough to make you thoroughly miserable. Two weeks, suicidal. Nobody had ever gone three weeks, under field conditions.

  Besides, as a defensive position, the stasis field could be a death-trap. The enemy has all the options since the dome is opaque; the only way you can find out what they’re up to is to stick your head out. They didn’t have to wade in with primitive weapons unless they were impatient. They could keep the dome saturated with laser fire and wait for you to turn off the generator. Meanwhile harassing you by throwing spears, rocks, arrows into the dome—you could return fire, but it was pretty futile.

  Of course, if one man stayed inside the base, the others could wait out the next half hour in the stasis field. If he didn’t come get them, they’d know the outside was hot. I chinned the combination that would give me a frequency available to everybody echelon 5 and above.

  “This is Major Mandella.” That still sounded like a bad joke.

  I outlined the situation to them and asked them to tell their troops that everyone in the company was free to move into the stasis field. I would stay behind and come retrieve them if things went well—not out of nobility, of course; I preferred taking the chance of being vaporized in a nanosecond, rather than almost certain slow death under the gray dome.

  I chinned Charlie’s frequency. “You can go, too. I’ll take care of things here.”

  “No, thanks,” he said slowly. “I’d just as soon…Hey, look at this.”

  The cruiser had launched another red dot, a couple of minutes behind the others. The display’s key identified it as being another drone. “That’s curious.”

  “Superstitious bastards,” he said without feeling.

  It turned out that only eleven people chose to join the fifty who had been ordered into the dome. That shouldn’t have surprised me, but it did.

  As the drones approached, Charlie and I stared at the monitors, carefully not looking at the holograph display, tacitly agreeing that it would be better not to know when they were one minute away, thirty seconds…And then, like the other times, it was over before we knew it had started. The screens glared white and there was a yowl of static, and we were still alive.

  But this time there were fifteen new holes on the horizon—or closer!—and the temperature was rising so fast that the last digit in the readout was an amorphous blur. The number peaked in the high 800s and began to slide back down.

  We had never seen any of the drones, not during that tiny fraction of a second it took the lasers to aim and fire. But then the seventeenth one flashed over the horizon, zigzagging crazily, and stopped directly overhead. For an instant it seemed to hover, and then it began to fall. Half the lasers had detected it, and they were firing steadily, but none of them could aim; they were all stuck in their last firing position.

  It glittered as it dropped, the mirror polish of its sleek hull reflecting the white glow from the craters and the eerie flickering of the constant, impotent laser fire. I heard Charlie take one deep breath, and the drone fell so close you could see spidery Tauran numerals etched on the hull and a transparent porthole near the tip—then its engine flared and it was suddenly gone.

  “What the hell?” Charlie said, quietly.

  The porthole. “Maybe reconnaissance.”

  “I guess. So we can’t touch them, and they know it.”

  “Unless the lasers recover.” Didn’t seem likely. “We better get everybody under the dome. Us, too.”

  He said a word whose vowel had changed over the centuries, but whose meaning was clear. “No hurry. Let’s see what they do.”

  We waited for several hours. The temperature outside stabilized at 690 degrees—just under the melting point of zinc, I remembered to no purpose—and I tried the manual controls for the lasers, but they were still frozen.

  “Here they come,” Charlie said. “Eight again.”

  I started for the display. “Guess we’ll—”

  “Wait! They aren’t drones.” The key identified all eight with the legend Troop Carrier.

  “Guess they want to take the base,” he said. “Intact.”

  That, and maybe try out new weapons and techniques. “It’s not much of a risk for them. They can always retreat and drop a nova bomb in our laps.”

  I called Brill and had her go get everybody who was in the stasis field, set them up with the remainder of her platoon as a defensive line circling around the northeast and northwest quadrants. I’d put the rest of the people on the other half-circle.

  “I wonder,” Charlie said. “Maybe we shouldn’t put everyone top-side at once. Until we know how many Taurans there are.”

  That was a point. Keep a reserve, let the enemy underestimate our strength. “It’s an idea…There might be just 64 of them in eight carriers.” Or 128 or 256. I wished our spy satellites had a finer sense of discrimination. But you can only cram so much into a machine the size of a grape.

  I decided to let Brill’s seventy people be our first line of defense and ordered them into a ring in the ditches we had made outside the base’s perimeter. Everybody else would stay downstairs until needed.

  If it turned out that the Taurans, either through numbers or new technology, could field an unstoppable force, I’d order everyone into the stasis field. There was a tunnel from the living quarters to the dome, so the people underground could go straight there in safety. The ones in the ditches would have to fall back under fire. If any of them were still alive when I gave the order.

  I called in Hilleboe and had her and Charlie keep watch over the lasers. If they came unstuck, I’d call Brill and her people back. Turn on the automatic aiming system again, then sit back and watch the show. But even stuck, the lasers could be useful. Charlie marked the monitors to show where the rays would go; he and Hilleboe could fire them manually whenever something moved into a weapon’s line-of-sight.

  We had about twenty minutes. Brill was walking around the perimeter with her men and women, ordering them into the ditches a squad at a time, setting up overlapping fields of fire. I broke in and asked her to set up the heavy weapons so that they could be used to channel the enemy’s advance into the path of the lasers.

  There wasn’t much else to do but wait. I asked Charlie to measure the enemy’s progress and try to give us an accurate countdown, then sat at my desk and pulled out a pad, to diagram Brill’s arrangement and see whether I could improve on it.

  The cat jumped up on my lap, mewling piteously. He’d evidently been unable to tell one person from the other, suited up. But nobody else ever sat at this desk. I reached up to pet him and he jumped away.

  The first line that I drew ripped through four sheets of paper. It had been some time since I’d done any delicate work in a suit. I remembered how in training, they’d made us practice controlling the strength-amplification circuits by passing eggs from person to person, messy business. I wondered if they still had eggs on Earth.

  The diagram completed, I couldn’t see any way to add to it. All those reams of theory crammed in my brain; there was plenty of tactical advice about envelopment and encirclement, but from the wrong point of view. If you were the one who was being encircled, you didn’t have many options. Sit tight and fight. Respond quickly to enemy concentrations of force, but stay flexible so the enemy can’t employ a diversionary force to divert strength from some predictable section of your perimeter. Make full use of air and space support, always good advice. Keep your head down and your chin up and pray for the cavalry. Hold your position and don’t contemplate Dienbienphu, the Alamo, the Battle of Hastings.

  “Eight more carriers out,” Charlie said. “Five minutes. Until the first eight get here.”

  So they were going to attack in two waves. At least two. What would I do, in the Tauran comma
nder’s position? That wasn’t too far-fetched; the Taurans lacked imagination in tactics and tended to copy human patterns.

  The first wave could be a throwaway, a kamikaze attack to soften us up and evaluate our defenses. Then the second would come in more methodically, and finish the job. Or vice versa: the first group would have twenty minutes to get entrenched; then the second could skip over their heads and hit us hard at one spot—breach the perimeter and overrun the base.

  Or maybe they sent out two forces simply because two was a magic number. Or they could launch only eight troop carriers at a time (that would be bad, implying that the carriers were large; in different situations they had used carriers holding as few as 4 troops or as many as 128).

  “Three minutes.” I stared at the cluster of monitors that showed various sectors of the minefield. If we were lucky, they’d land out there, out of caution. Or maybe pass over it low enough to detonate mines.

  I was feeling vaguely guilty. I was safe in my hole, doodling, ready to start calling out orders. How did those seventy sacrificial lambs feel about their absentee commander?

  Then I remembered how I had felt about Captain Stott that first mission, when he’d elected to stay safely in orbit while we fought on the ground. The rush of remembered hate was so strong I had to bite back nausea.

  “Hilleboe, can you handle the lasers by yourself?”

  “I don’t see why not, sir.”

  I tossed down the pen and stood up. “Charlie, you take over the unit coordination; you can do it as well as I could. I’m going topside.”

  “I wouldn’t advise that, sir.”

  “Hell no, William. Don’t be an idiot.”