Bill 7 - the Galactic Hero (6 page)

"Excellent! Remember, we're not actually going to be killing any people in this attack, because all human life is sacred, even that of godless traitors who deserve to be tortured to death. Just blow up the buildings that are marked in red on your screen.

“And here's a little something to show my confidence in you. We attack in five minutes. The Lord, the Emperor, and I are all counting on you. Good luck and God bless!”

The general disappeared from the video display before Bill could react. Bill was more interested in what was happening at the change machine anyway. Coins were pouring out of it, and its display was blinking NO CHARGE! NO CHARGE! NO CHARGE! Five credits worth of quarters! Bill wiped away a tear at this sign of his commander's faith in him.

He gathered the fallen coins and stacked them neatly on the little shelf above the controls. The first coin went into the slot, and for the first time Bill pressed the red button for live fire.

The target screen wasn't the same as the one he'd been training on, but that was fine. Bill had learned to expect surprises in combat.

The Heavenly Peace's artificial gravity held everything steady, but Bill's chair swiveled and swooped and twisted so he could get fully nauseated by the dive through the atmosphere toward the Eyerackian defenses.

There! A small dot on the screen glowed red! All that time and all those quarters spent in training were not wasted. Bill waited until he was in range, then launched a smart missile.

They were called smart missiles, but in fact they were even dumber as Bill himself, which was pretty dumb. It wasn't enough to show them the target; Bill had to steer them in to the target by the TV pictures they sent back from their nose cameras. The experience was very much like a roller coaster ride in which you got blown up at the end, or like being a commando, except that you didn't actually die.

There were explosions all around, but Bill ignored them. He concentrated on guiding his missile straight into the gun emplacement. At the last second, he could see the Eyerackian gunners running away from their posts, and then the screen went blank. At the top, it said GUN EMPLACEMENT: 50 POINTS, and the score total went to 50, and then there was another dot of red set up for him.

The great battle had begun.

It was not the mother of all battles. But at least it was the second cousin, twice removed, of all battles.

The Heavenly Peace was the scout and command ship for the great assault, and teeniest vessel in the armada. The General's ship had barely enough firepower to destroy a planet. But it led the greatest armed force ever assembled since the last one, in February. Millions of heroic troopers aboard thousands of gallant ships displayed their heroism by dropping bombs from a very great distance. And behind all this great venture lay a single only partially unhinged mind, the dominating intelligence of General Wormwood Weissearse.

The Emperor had said, “Go, thou, and return unto me my straying sheep of Eyerack,” and the General had leaped into action with a brilliant plan, glazed eyeballs and organizational genius.

Well, that wasn't exactly how it happened. It was really like one aide whispered the news from Eyerack into one of the Emperor's ears, the ear that was slightly less deaf, and the Emperor mumbled something and drooled significantly, and another aide, stationed a safe distance from the Imperial mouth, announced the Emperor's inspirational words and thoughts. The General's plan boiled down to “bomb 'em back to the Early Stone Age.” And his organization consisted of saying to a bunch of officers, “Get your ships and come with me.”

But the roboflacks on board the Heavenly Peace got their story into circulation and kept it there, and the citizens of the Empire, who knew little and cared less, figured that it must be true. There were even those very few who were dim enough to believe the endless flow of military propaganda.

So it was that the great fleet swooped down on the defense installations of Eyerack in wave after wave, in a massive surgical strike that would wipe out the entire defensive system of a planet without killing any civilians and maybe no more than 2.5 defenders. It was almost too good to believe.

But believe it people did, particularly Bill. He could see the evidence with his own eyes, right up there on the video screen — and video screens don't lie, do they? He was seeing the action first-hand, through the nose cameras of the smart missiles that were doing the work. The smart missiles that he, Bill, feeling he was soon to be a galactic hero twice over, was guiding with more than superhuman precision to their destinies.

The first wave of ships, with Bill in the tail of the lead, concentrated on Anti-Spaceship defenses. The vast armada swooped deep into the atmosphere of Eyerack and destroyed whatever weapons down there might hurt them. Thousands of gallant gunners like Bill risked the terrors of modern long-distance warfare — motion sickness, boredom, exhaustion, thirst, horniness — to protect their comrades from the terrible wrath of Eyerack.

One target after another popped red on Bill's screen, one missile after another was launched from the rectal tubes of the General's space spider. Bill's confidence in himself and his weapons systems — they were much too sophisticated to be mere weapons — grew with each direct hit. His first smart missile had hit the gun at which he'd aimed it, but soon he was trying for even greater precision. Now he was putting his missile right down the barrel of a gun, or swooping around from behind into the ammunition stores. And every time, as he had been told, the warning sirens of the incoming missile gave the gun crews time to get the bowb out of there.

Bill started to get giddy with his success. He sent his missiles into loop-de-loops and barrel rolls and Immelmanns, spelled out words with their tracks; he was really beginning to enjoy himself. After a while he even realized that he could use the nose cameras on his missiles to look around the battlefield at no danger to himself.

There was some danger to the missiles, of course. The Eyerackians, not realizing that the huge military force surrounding their planet had nothing but their best interests at heart, were doing their best to shoot down everything in the sky. They would try to shoot down the missiles, and sometimes they would even succeed. Bill hated that, because he needed to rack up as many points as possible. To get extra time so he wouldn't have to add any of his own quarters to the pile General Weissearse had given him. Sometimes the Eyerackian gunners would be shooting at something else, something Bill couldn't see on his screen. And sometimes, Bill started to notice, the soldiers at the guns didn't have any chance to run away when they didn't shoot down the missiles.

The nose cameras blew up with the missile, of course, so he never saw the explosions, but it gradually dawned on him that some of the Eyerackian soldiers were being blown up at the same time. Bill had been partially blown up a few times himself, and he felt a certain sympathy for the Eyerackians.

During a brief slow spell, he took one of his missiles on a little tour of the area. For the first time he could see the whole fleet, spread out across the sky like a patient etherized on a table. There were thousands of ships, ranging in size from scouts like the Heavenly Peace all the way up to dreadnoughts that were so big they couldn't come into the atmosphere. The smaller ships were attacking in waves, each wave led by a scout ship, holding them all in neat formations by remote control. Each of the larger ships released its own wave of bombers and fighters and flying missile platforms.

The missile platforms floated high up, over the action, lobbing missiles down through the clouds. The bombers charged straight in at their targets, surrounded by a buzzing sphere of fighters. As Bill watched, a group of fighters detached itself from one cloud and zoomed down to meet another group coming up from below. They were all dots from this distance, so he couldn't tell who was winning, but then a bomber exploded. Bill drove his missile down toward the airfield, which flashed red — AIRFIELD: 100 POINTS — just before he hit it.

This wasn't fair! Here the Empire was doing its very best not to kill anyone, and these vile Eyerackians were trying to kill Bill's buddies! In the back of his mind, Bill realized that he didn't really know any of those people, and that, after all, in the Troopers it was always bowb-your-buddy week. Also maybe the weeks of subliminal patriotic music had had an effect on him. Maybe even some of General Weissearse's sermons had sunk in while he was asleep. Maybe it even had something to do with the hypno-coils embedded in the chair. For whatever reason, now Bill was fighting mad.

Now he had a clear sense of mission. His job was to destroy anything that might harm his buddies, his pals, his comrades in arms. And, not incidentally, himself.

He knocked out another Anti-Space-Ship missile base, then obliterated an Anti-Aircraft-Artillery emplacement, then blew up an ammo dump, and destroyed some more AAA, and cratered an airfield, and, kicked some more ASS.

By now the Eyerackian defense command had alerted their troops, and the front of the attack wave was itself being attacked. Bill couldn't concentrate only on ground installations any more; he was using his lasers now to pick off missiles that were aimed at him! His chair was swooping and dodging and ducking and spinning and bobbing and weaving until Bill was glad the only food he'd had in weeks was the liquid nutrient gruel from the dispenser in the turret. Anything else would be all over his video screen.

There were no more slow periods. Bill was too busy shooting down attacking fighters and missiles, most of the time, to worry about where they were coming from. All he knew was that they kept coming. The only breaks he got were when he had to put in another quarter, and he couldn't risk taking very long with that. Fortunately, he was racking up enough points to keep the guns going for a long time.

Bill barely had time to think about how safe the General had promised this mission would be.

Now that he was mostly using the lasers, he had a sort of normal view to the rear. It was punctuated by arrows and flashing red signals and green halos around the ships of the armada, but it still showed him what was going on. And what was going on was that all hell was breaking loose.

The entire battle was being fought in the air, and it was moving around the planet at great speed. But it was still a battle.

Missiles were flying up toward the ships and down toward the ground and between the ships and the bombers and fighters of the fleet and the Eyerackian fighters. Laser beams crisscrossed the sky, burning or exploding or slicing up whatever they found. Sometimes a laser blast from one of the Imperial ships would slice open one of their own bombers while trying to intercept a fighter. Without the red and green markings on the screen, Bill would never have been able to tell what side anyone was on, and he sure hoped that the other attackers had a system like his. Even with it, sometimes his screen was just a big mass of red and green dots.

The sky was full of whizzing death. The Heavenly Peace, being in the lead of the attack, only had to worry about what was actually being aimed at her — although that was quite enough, thanks. The rest of the ships and planes were flying through a steady rain of shells and missiles and bullets and fighters and bombers and electronic chaff and debris. Mostly debris. The ships had repeller fields to take care of the smaller pieces of metal, but the planes were getting chewed up by left over chunks of bombs and missiles and shells and even other planes, chunks that were just as good as a bomb or a laser in tearing off a wing or plowing through a cockpit or a gun turret.

There was no way to tell anymore who was shooting whom. If a bomber — or, sometimes, an Imperial ship — went down, it might have been from Eyerackian fire, or Imperial fire, or just from running into junk.

It didn't matter any more. Bill wasn't paying attention to selected targets any more, either. Not even to his point totals (which were pretty low, because flying debris, no matter how dangerous, wasn't worth any points at all to the computer). He just shot everything that looked like it might be getting close to him.

And then suddenly everything was getting farther away.

It took a couple of minutes for Bill to realize that the Heavenly Peace had pulled out of the attack, back towards a planetary orbit. While his turret computer worked out his total score and bonuses for the day, General Weissearse popped up in a little mortise in the upper left-hand corner of the screen.

The General had put a belt around his muumuu so it looked more like a standard uniform, although not much. He was standing in front of a hologlobe of Eyerack that had arrows and diagrams all over it, and an off-screen voice was saying, “...your favorite General and mine, troopers and journalists, here he is, Stormy Wormy Weissearse!”

There was a burst of applause from the recorded studio audience.

“Thank you, thank you,” the General said. "As you know, our purely defensive and completely justified and morally pure attack on the godless heathens of Eyerack began just a few hours ago. All the operational details of the attack are, of course, absolutely secret and will remain so forever. But I can give you some idea of how the operation is going so far.

“Everything is just hunky-dory.”

The screen went to a split screen. On the right was a shot of the reporters, who were jumping up and down like school kids, waving their arms and trying to get the General's attention, despite being on a different ship a million miles away. A trooper slipped a microphone in front of one of them and handed her a slip of paper.

“General Weissearse,” she read, “to what do you attribute the overwhelming success of today's battle?”

“Of course, most of the credit has to go to me, as the creator of our brilliant strategic plan and leader of our gallant troops. And I suppose a weensy bit of it has to go to those brave men and women who are putting their lives on the line in this daring, yet completely safe, operation. But most of all, our victory is due to our faith in God, and God's faith in us as his instrument in chastising the atheistic warmongering rebels of Eyerack. All of our success is owed to the Lord. Hallelujah!”