The Forever War Read online

  “Now, as far as your spaceport, Mandella, is concerned—there just isn’t one. Nothing.

  “That cruiser the Hope caulked had probably been left in orbit, like ours has to be. If they have any equivalent of a scoutship, or drone missiles, they’re either not kept here or they’re well hidden.”

  “Bohrs here. Then what did they attack with, while we were coming down from orbit?”

  “I wish we knew, Private.

  “Obviously, we don’t have any way of estimating their numbers, not directly. Recon pictures failed to show a single Tauran on the grounds of the base. Meaning nothing, because it is an alien environment. Indirectly, though…we count the number of broomsticks, those flying things.

  “There are fifty-one huts, and each has at most one broomstick. Four don’t have any parked outside, but we located three at various other parts of the base. Maybe this indicates that there are fifty-one Taurans, one of whom was outside the base when the picture was taken.”

  “Keating here. Or fifty-one officers.”

  “That’s right—maybe fifty thousand infantrymen stacked in one of these buildings. No way to tell. Maybe ten Taurans, each with five broomsticks, to use according to his mood.

  “We’ve got one thing in our favor, and that’s communications. They evidently use a frequency modulation of megahertz electromagnetic radiation.”

  “Radio!”

  “That’s right, whoever you are. Identify yourself when you speak. So it’s quite possible that they can’t detect our phased-neutrino communications. Also, just prior to the attack, the Hope is going to deliver a nice dirty fission bomb; detonate it in the upper atmosphere right over the base. That’ll restrict them to line-of-sight communications for some time; even those will be full of static.”

  “Why don’t…Tate here…why don’t they just drop the bomb right in their laps. Save us a lot of—”

  “That doesn’t even deserve an answer, Private. But the answer is, they might. And you better hope they don’t. If they caulk the base, it’ll be for the safety of the Hope. After we’ve attacked, and probably before we’re far enough away for it to make much difference.

  “We keep that from happening by doing a good job. We have to reduce the base to where it can no longer function; at the same time, leave as much intact as possible. And take one prisoner.”

  “Potter here. You mean, at least one prisoner.”

  “I mean what I say. One only. Potter…you’re relieved of your platoon. Send Chavez up.”

  “All right, Sergeant.” The relief in her voice was unmistakable.

  ~~~

  Cortez continued with his map and instructions. There was one other building whose function was pretty obvious; it had a large steerable dish antenna on top. We were to destroy it as soon as the grenadiers got in range.

  The attack plan was very loose. Our signal to begin would be the flash of the fission bomb. At the same time, several drones would converge on the base, so we could see what their antispacecraft defenses were. We would try to reduce the effectiveness of those defenses without destroying them completely.

  Immediately after the bomb and the drones, the grenadiers would vaporize a line of seven huts. Everybody would break through the hole into the base…and what would happen after that was anybody’s guess.

  Ideally, we’d sweep from that end of the base to the other, destroying certain targets, caulking all but one Tauran. But that was unlikely to happen, as it depended on the Taurans’ offering very little resistance.

  On the other hand, if the Taurans showed obvious superiority from the beginning, Cortez would give the order to scatter. Everybody had a different compass bearing for retreat—we’d blossom out in all directions, the survivors to rendezvous in a valley some forty klicks east of the base. Then we’d see about a return engagement, after the Hope softened the base up a bit.

  “One last thing,” Cortez rasped. “Maybe some of you feel the way Potter evidently does, maybe some of your men feel that way…that we ought to go easy, not make this so much of a bloodbath. Mercy is a luxury, a weakness we can’t afford to indulge in at this stage of the war. All we know about the enemy is that they have killed seven hundred and ninety-eight humans. They haven’t shown any restraint in attacking our cruisers, and it’d be foolish to expect any this time, this first ground action.

  “They are responsible for the lives of all of your comrades who died in training, and for Ho, and for all the others who are surely going to die today. I can’t understand anybody who wants to spare them. But that doesn’t make any difference. You have your orders and, what the hell, you might as well know, all of you have a post-hypnotic suggestion that I will trigger by a phrase, just before the battle. It will make your job easier.”

  “Sergeant…”

  “Shut up. We’re short on time; get back to your platoons and brief them. We move out in five minutes.”

  The platoon leaders returned to their men, leaving Cortez and ten of us—plus three teddy bears, milling around, getting in the way.

  Fifteen

  We took the last five klicks very carefully, sticking to the highest grass, running across occasional clearings. When we were 500 meters from where the base was supposed to be, Cortez took the third platoon forward to scout, while the rest of us laid low.

  Cortez’s voice came over the general freak: “Looks pretty much like we expected. Advance in a file, crawling. When you get to the third platoon, follow your squad leader to the left or right.”

  We did that and wound up with a string of eighty-three people in a line roughly perpendicular to the direction of attack. We were pretty well hidden, except for the dozen or so teddy bears that mooched along the line, munching grass.

  There was no sign of life inside the base. All of the buildings were windowless and a uniform shiny white. The huts that were our first objective were large featureless half-buried eggs some sixty meters apart. Cortez assigned one to each grenadier.

  We were broken into three fire teams: team A consisted of platoons two, four, and six; team B was one, three, and five; the command platoon was team C.

  “Less than a minute now—filters down!—when I say ‘fire,’ grenadiers, take out your targets. God help you if you miss.”

  There was a sound like a giant’s belch, and a stream of five or six iridescent bubbles floated up from the flower-shaped building. They rose with increasing speed until they were almost out of sight, then shot off to the south, over our heads. The ground was suddenly bright, and for the first time in a long time, I saw my shadow, a long one pointed north. The bomb had gone off prematurely. I just had time to think that it didn’t make too much difference; it’d still make alphabet soup out of their communications—

  “Drones!” A ship came screaming in just about tree level, and a bubble was in the air to meet it. When they contacted, the bubble popped and the drone exploded into a million tiny fragments. Another one came from the opposite side and suffered the same fate.

  “FIRE!” Seven bright glares of 500-microton grenades and a sustained concussion that surely would have killed an unprotected man.

  “Filters up.” Gray haze of smoke and dust. Clods of dirt falling with a sound like heavy raindrops.

  “Listen up:

  ‘Scots, wha hae wi’ Wallace bled;

  Scots, wham Bruce has aften led,

  Welcome to your gory bed,

  Or to victory!’”

  I hardly heard him for trying to keep track of what was going on in my skull. I knew it was just posthypnotic suggestion, even remembered the session in Missouri when they’d implanted it, but that didn’t make it any less compelling. My mind reeled under the strong pseudomemories: shaggy hulks that were Taurans (not at all what we now knew they looked like) boarding a colonists’ vessel, eating babies while mothers watched in screaming terror (the colonists never took babies; they wouldn’t stand the acceleration), then raping the women to death with huge veined purple members (ridiculous that they would feel des
ire for humans), holding the men down while they plucked flesh from their living bodies and gobbled it (as if they could assimilate the alien protein)…a hundred grisly details as sharply remembered as the events of a minute ago, ridiculously overdone and logically absurd. But while my conscious mind was rejecting the silliness, somewhere much deeper, down in that sleeping animal where we keep our real motives and morals, something was thirsting for alien blood, secure in the conviction that the noblest thing a man could do would be to die killing one of those horrible monsters…

  I knew it was all purest soyashit, and I hated the men who had taken such obscene liberties with my mind, but I could even hear my teeth grinding, feel my cheeks frozen in a spastic grin, bloodlust…A teddy bear walked in front of me, looking dazed. I started to raise my laser-finger, but somebody beat me to it and the creature’s head exploded in a cloud of gray splinters and blood.

  Lucky groaned, half-whining, “Dirty…filthy fucken bastards.” Lasers flared and crisscrossed, and all of the teddy bears fell dead. “Watch it, goddammit,” Cortez screamed. “Aim those fucken things—they aren’t toys!

  “Team A, move out—into the craters to cover B.”

  Somebody was laughing and sobbing. “What the fuck is wrong with you, Petrov?” Strange to hear Cortez cussing. I twisted around and saw Petrov, behind and to my left, lying in a shallow hole, digging frantically with both hands, crying and gurgling. “Fuck,” Cortez said. “Team B! Ten meters past the craters, get down in a line. Team C—into the craters with A.”

  I scrambled up and covered the hundred meters in twelve amplified strides. The craters were practically large enough to hide a scout-ship, some ten meters in diameter. I jumped to the opposite side of the hole and landed next to a fellow named Chin. He didn’t even look around when I landed, just kept scanning the base for signs of life.

  “Team A—ten meters, past team B, down in line.” Just as he finished, the building in front of us burped, and a salvo of the bubbles fanned out toward our lines. Most people saw it coming and got down, but Chin was just getting up to make his rush and stepped right into one.

  It grazed the top of his helmet and disappeared with a faint pop. He took one step backward and toppled over the edge of the crater, trailing an arc of blood and brains. Lifeless, spread-eagled, he slid halfway to the bottom, shoveling dirt into the perfectly symmetrical hole where the bubble had chewed indiscriminately through plastic, hair, skin, bone, and brain.

  “Everybody hold it. Platoon leaders, casualty report…check…check, check…check, check, check…check. We have three deaders. Wouldn’t be any if you’d have kept low. So everybody grab dirt when you hear that thing go off. Team A, complete the rush.”

  They completed the maneuver without incident. “Okay. Team C, rush to where B…hold it! Down!”

  Everybody was already hugging the ground. The bubbles slid by in a smooth arc about two meters off the ground. They went serenely over our heads and, except for one that made toothpicks out of a tree, disappeared in the distance.

  “B, rush past A ten meters. C, take over B’s place. You B grenadiers, see if you can reach the Flower.”

  Two grenades tore up the ground thirty or forty meters from the structure. In a good imitation of panic, it started belching out a continuous stream of bubbles—still, none coming lower than two meters off the ground. We kept hunched down and continued to advance.

  Suddenly, a seam appeared in the building and widened to the size of a large door. Taurans came swarming out. “Grenadiers, hold your fire. B team, laser fire to the left and right—keep’m bunched up. A and C, rush down the center.” One Tauran died trying to run through a laser beam. The others stayed where they were.

  In a suit, it’s pretty awkward to run and keep your head down at the same time. You have to go from side to side, like a skater getting started; otherwise you’ll be airborne. At least one person, somebody in A team, bounced too high and suffered the same fate as Chin.

  I was feeling pretty fenced-in and trapped, with a wall of laser fire on each side and a low ceiling that meant death to touch. But in spite of myself, I felt happy, euphoric, finally getting the chance to kill some of those villainous baby-eaters. Knowing it was soyashit.

  They weren’t fighting back, except for the rather ineffective bubbles (obviously not designed as an antipersonnel weapon), and they didn’t retreat back into the building, either. They milled around, about a hundred of them, and watched us get closer. A couple of grenades would caulk them all, but I guess Cortez was thinking about the prisoner.

  “Okay, when I say ‘go,’ we’re going to flank ’em. B team will hold fire…Second and fourth platoons to the right, sixth and seventh to the left. B team will move forward in line to box them in.

  “Go!” We peeled off to the left. As soon as the lasers stopped, the Taurans bolted, running in a group on a collision course with our flank.

  “A team, down and fire! Don’t shoot until you’re sure of your aim—if you miss you might hit a friendly. And fer Chris’ sake save me one!”

  It was a horrifying sight, that herd of monsters bearing down on us. They were running in great leaps—the bubbles avoiding them—and they all looked like the one we saw earlier, riding the broomstick; naked except for an almost transparent sphere around their whole bodies, that moved along with them. The right flank started firing, picking off individuals in the rear of the pack.

  Suddenly a laser flared through the Taurans from the other side, somebody missing his mark. There was a horrible scream, and I looked down the line to see someone—I think it was Perry—writhing on the ground, right hand over the smoldering stump of his arm, seared off just below the elbow. Blood sprayed through his fingers, and the suit, its camouflage circuits scrambled, flickered black-white-jungle-desert-green-gray. I don’t know how long I stared—long enough for the medic to run over and start giving aid—but when I looked up the Taurans were almost on top of me.

  My first shot was wild and high, but it grazed the top of the leading Tauran’s protective bubble. The bubble disappeared and the monster stumbled and fell to the ground, jerking spasmodically.

  Foam gushed out of his mouth-hole, first white, then streaked red. With one last jerk he became rigid and twisted backward, almost to the shape of a horseshoe. His long scream, a high-pitched whistle, stopped just as his comrades trampled over him. I hated myself for smiling.

  It was slaughter, even though our flank was outnumbered five to one. They kept coming without faltering, even when they had to climb over the drift of bodies and parts of bodies that piled up high, parallel to our flank. The ground between us was slick red with Tauran blood—all God’s children got hemoglobin—and like the teddy bears, their guts looked pretty much like guts to my untrained eye. My helmet reverberated with hysterical laughter while we slashed them to gory chunks, and I almost didn’t hear Cortez:

  “Hold your fire—I said HOLD IT, goddammit! Catch a couple of the bastards, they won’t hurt you.”

  I stopped shooting and eventually so did everybody else. When the next Tauran jumped over the smoking pile of meat in front of me, I dove to try to tackle him around those spindly legs.

  It was like hugging a big, slippery balloon. When I tried to drag him down, he popped out of my arms and kept running.

  We managed to stop one of them by the simple expedient of piling half-a-dozen people on top of him. By that time the others had run through our line and were headed for the row of large cylindrical tanks that Cortez had said were probably for storage. A little door had opened in the base of each one.

  “We’ve got our prisoner,” Cortez shouted. “Kill!”

  They were fifty meters away and running hard, difficult targets. Lasers slashed around them, bobbing high and low. One fell, sliced in two, but the others, about ten of them, kept going and were almost to the doors when the grenadiers started firing.

  They were still loaded with 500-mike bombs, but a near miss wasn’t enough—the concussion would just send
them flying, unhurt in their bubbles.

  “The buildings! Get the fucken buildings!” The grenadiers raised their aim and let fly, but the bombs only seemed to scorch the white outside of the structures until, by chance, one landed in a door. That split the building just as if it had a seam; the two halves popped away and a cloud of machinery flew into the air, accompanied by a huge pale flame that rolled up and disappeared in an instant. Then the others all concentrated on the doors, except for potshots at some of the Taurans, not so much to get them as to blow them away before they could get inside. They seemed awfully eager.

  All this time, we were trying to get the Taurans with laser fire, while they weaved and bounced around trying to get into the structures. We moved in as close to them as we could without putting ourselves in danger from the grenade blasts, yet too far away for good aim.

  Still, we were getting them one by one and managed to destroy four of the seven buildings. Then, when there were only two aliens left, a nearby grenade blast flung one of them to within a few meters of a door. He dove in and several grenadiers fired salvos after him, but they all fell short or detonated harmlessly on the side. Bombs were falling all around, making an awful racket, but the sound was suddenly drowned out by a great sigh, like a giant’s intake of breath, and where the building had been was a thick cylindrical cloud of smoke, solid-looking, dwindling away into the stratosphere, straight as if laid down by a ruler. The other Tauran had been right at the base of the cylinder; I could see pieces of him flying. A second later, a shock wave hit us and I rolled helplessly, pinwheeling, to smash into the pile of Tauran bodies and roll beyond.

  I picked myself up and panicked for a second when I saw there was blood all over my suit—when I realized it was only alien blood, I relaxed but felt unclean.

  “Catch the bastard! Catch him!” In the confusion, the Tauran had gotten free and was running for the grass. One platoon was chasing after him, losing ground, but then all of B team ran over and cut him off. I jogged over to join in the fun.