The Mammoth Book of SF Wars (15 page)

I’d planned to duck away once we were beyond the Gerin lines – assuming we made it that far, and since the other side of the strip hadn’t been so heavily attacked, we probably would. I had better things to do than babysit a major playing politics with the captain’s life. But the captain’s gaze had the same wide-blue-sky openness it had always had, barring a few times he was whacked out on bootleg whiskey.

“I’m glad you’ve got Gunny Vargas with you,” the captain said. “He’s got eyes in the dark.”

“If it takes us that long, we’re in trouble again,” said the major gruffly. I smiled at the captain, and followed Sewell away down the trail, thinking of the years since I’d been in that stuffy little courtroom back on that miserable backwater colony planet. The captain played fair, on the whole; he never asked for more than his due, and usually got less. If he wanted me to babysit the major, I would. It was the least I could do for him.

We lost only three on the way to meet the Beta-site survivors, and I saved the major’s life twice. The second time, the Gerin tentacle I stopped shattered my arm just as thoroughly as a bullet. The major thanked me, in the way that officers are taught to do, but the thought behind his narrow forehead was that my heroism didn’t do him a bit of good unless he could win something. The medic we had along slapped a field splint on the arm, and shot me up with something that took all the sharp edges off. That worried me, but I knew it would wear off in a few hours. I’d have time enough.

Then we walked on, and on, and damn near ran headlong into our own people. They looked a lot better than we did, not having been shot up by Gerin for several days; in fact, they looked down-right smart. The butterbar had an expression somewhere between serious and smug – he figured he’d done a better than decent job with his people, and the glance I got from his senior sergeant said the kid was OK. Sewell took over without explaining much, except that we’d been attacked and were now going to counter-attack; I was glad he didn’t go further. It could have created a problem for me.

Caedmon’s an official record, now. You’ve seen the tapes, maybe, or the famous shot of the final Gerin assault up the hills above the shuttle strip, the one that survived in someone’s personal vicam to be stripped later by Naval Intelligence after we took the hills back, and had time to retrieve personal effects. You know that our cruisers came back, launched fighters that tore the Gerin fighters out of the sky, and then more shuttles, with more troops, enough to finish the job on the surface. You know that the “gallant forces” of the first landing (yeah, I heard that speech, too) are credited with
almost
winning against fearful odds, even wiping out the Gerin commander and its staff, thanks to the brilliant tactic of one Marine captain, unfortunately himself a casualty of that last day of battle. You’ve seen his picture, with those summer-sky-blue eyes and that steadfast expression, a stranger to envy and fear alike.

But I know what happened to Major Sewell, who is listed simply as “killed in action”. I know how come the captain got his post-humous medals and promotion, something for his family back home to put up on their wall. I know exactly how the Gerin commander died, and who died of Gerin weapons and who of human steel. And I don’t think I have to tell you every little detail, do I? It all comes down to politics, after all. An honest politician, as the saying goes, is the one who stays bought. I was bought a long time ago, with the only coin that buys any gypsy’s soul, and with that death (you know which death) I was freed.

ARENA

Fredric Brown

Suppose single combat might decide the fate of interstellar empires …

One of us editors still vividly remembers reading Fredric Brown’s collection of brief witty stories,
Nightmares and Geezenstacks,
then newly published, while hitchhiking across Germany in 1961; “Arena” has stuck in the mind for a long time too. Brown also wrote many detective stories, and solving clues is a key to the outcome of what happens in a place beyond space and time.

C
ARSON OPENED HIS
eyes, and found himself looking upwards into a flickering blue dimness.

It was hot, and he was lying on sand, and a rock embedded in the sand was hurting his back. He rolled over to his side, off the rock, and then pushed himself up to a sitting position.

I’m crazy, he thought. Crazy – or dead – or something. The sand was blue, bright blue. And there wasn’t any such thing as bright blue sand on Earth or any of the planets. Blue sand under a blue dome that wasn’t the sky nor yet a room, but a circumscribed area – somehow he knew it was circumscribed and finite even though he couldn’t see to the top of it.

He picked up some of the sand in his hand and let it run through his fingers. It trickled down on to his bare leg. Bare?

He was stark naked, and already his body was dripping perspiration from the enervating heat, coated blue wherever sand had touched it. Elsewhere his body was white.

He thought: then this sand is really blue. If it seemed blue only because of the blue light, then I’d be blue also. But I’m white, so the sand is blue. Blue sand: there isn’t any blue sand. There isn’t any place like this place I’m in.

Sweat was running down in his eyes. It was hot, hotter than hell. Only hell – the hell of the ancients – was supposed to be red and not blue.

But if this place wasn’t hell, what was it? Only Mercury, among the planets, had heat like this and this wasn’t Mercury. And Mercury was some four billion miles from … From?

It came back to him then, where he’d been: in the little one-man scouter, outside the orbit of Pluto, scouting a scant million miles to one side of the Earth Armada drawn up in battle array there to intercept the Outsiders.

That sudden strident ringing of the alarm bell when the rival scouter – the Outsider ship – had come within range of his detectors!

No one knew who the Outsiders were, what they looked like, or from what far galaxy they came, other than that it was in the general direction of the Pleiades.

First, there had been sporadic raids on Earth colonies and outposts; isolated battles between Earth patrols and small groups of Outsider spaceships; battles sometimes won and sometimes lost, but never resulting in the capture of an alien vessel. Nor had any member of a raided colony ever survived to describe the Outsiders who had left the ships, if indeed they had left them.

Not too serious a menace, at first, for the raids had not been numerous or destructive. And, individually, the ships had proved slightly inferior in armament to the best of Earth’s fighters, although somewhat superior in speed and manoeuvrability. A sufficient edge in speed, in fact, to give the Outsiders their choice of running or fighting, unless surrounded.

Nevertheless, Earth had prepared for serious trouble, building the mightiest armada of all time. It had been waiting now, that armada, for a long time. Now the showdown was coming.

Scouts twenty billion miles out had detected the approach of a mighty fleet of the Outsiders. Those scouts had never come back, but their radiotronic messages had. And now Earth’s armada, all ten thousand ships and half-million fighting spacemen, was out there, outside Pluto’s orbit, waiting to intercept and battle to the death.

And an even battle it was going to be, judging by the advance reports of the men of the far picket line who had given their lives to report – before they had died – on the size and strength of the alien fleet.

Anybody’s battle, with the mastery of the solar system hanging in the balance, on an even chance. A last and only chance for Earth and all her colonies lay at the utter mercy of the Outsiders if they ran that gauntlet. Oh yes. Bob Carson remembered now. He remembered that strident bell and his leap for the control panel. His frenzied fumbling as he strapped himself into the seat. The dot in the visiplate that grew larger. The dryness of his mouth. The awful knowledge that this was it for him, at least, although the main fleets were still out of range of one another.

This, his first taste of battle! Within three seconds or less he’d be victorious, or a charred cinder. One hit completely took care of a lightly armed and armoured one-man craft like a scouter.

Frantically – as his lips shaped the word “one” – he worked at the controls to keep that growing dot centred on the crossed spiderwebs of the visiplate. His hands doing that, while his right foot hovered over the pedal that would fire the bolt. The single bolt of concentrated hell that had to hit – or else. There wouldn’t be time for any second shot.

“Two.” He didn’t know he’d said that, either. The dot in the visiplate wasn’t a dot now. Only a few thousand miles away, it showed up in the magnification of the plate as though it were only a few hundred yards off. It was a fast little scouter, about the size of his.

An alien ship, all right!

“Thr—” His foot touched the bolt-release pedal.

And then the Outsider had swerved suddenly and was off the crosshairs. Carson punched keys frantically to follow.

For a tenth of a second, it was out of the visiplate entirely, and then as the nose of his scouter swung after it, he saw it again, diving straight towards the ground.

The ground?

It was an optical illusion of some sort. It had to be: that planet – or whatever it was – that now covered the visiplate couldn’t be there. Couldn’t possibly! There wasn’t any planet nearer than Neptune three billion miles away – with Pluto on the opposite side of the distant pinpoint sun.

His detectors! They hadn’t shown any object of planetary dimensions, even of asteroid dimensions, and still didn’t.

It couldn’t be there, that whatever-it-was he was diving into, only a few hundred miles below him.

In his sudden anxiety to keep from crashing, he forgot the Outsider ship. He fired the front breaking rockets and, even as the sudden change of speed slammed him forward against the seat straps, fired full right for an emergency turn. Pushed them down and held them down, knowing that he needed everything the ship had to keep from crashing and that a turn that sudden would black him out for a moment.

It did black him out.

And that was all. Now he was sitting in hot blue sand, stark naked but otherwise unhurt. No sign of his spaceship and – for that matter – no sign of space. That curve overhead wasn’t a sky, whatever else it was.

He scrambled to his feet.

Gravity seemed a little more than Earth-normal. Not much more.

Flat sand stretching away, a few scrawny bushes in clumps here and there. The bushes were blue, too, but in varying shades, some lighter than the blue of the sand, some darker.

Out from under the nearest bush ran a little thing that was like a lizard, except that it had more than four legs. It was blue, too. Bright blue. It saw him and ran back again under the bush.

He looked up again, trying to decide what was overhead. It wasn’t exactly a roof, but it was dome-shaped. It flickered and was hard to look at. But, definitely, it curved down to the ground, to the blue sand, all around him.

He wasn’t far from being under the centre of the dome. At a guess, it was a hundred yards to the nearest wall, if it was a wall. It was as though a blue hemisphere of something about two hundred and fifty yards in circumference was inverted over the flat expanse of the sand.

And everything blue, except one object. Over near a far curving wall there was a red object. Roughly spherical, it seemed to be about a yard in diameter. Too far for him to see clearly through the flickering blueness.

But, unaccountably, he shuddered.

He wiped sweat from his forehead, or tried to, with the back of his hand.

Was this a dream, a nightmare? This heat, this sand, that vague feeling of horror he felt when he looked towards that red thing?

A dream? No, one didn’t go to sleep and dream in the midst of a battle in space.

Death? No, never. If there were immortality, it wouldn’t be a senseless thing like this, a thing of blue heat and blue sand and a red horror.

Then he heard the voice.

Inside his head he heard it, not with his ears. It came from nowhere or everywhere.

“Through spaces and dimensions wandering,” rang the words in his mind, “and in this space and this time, I find two peoples about to exterminate one and so weaken the other that it would retrogress and never fulfil its destiny, but decay and return to mindless dust whence it came. And I say this must not happen.”

“Who … What are you?” Carson didn’t say it aloud, but the question formed itself in his brain.

“You would not understand completely. I am—” There was a pause as though the voice sought – in Carson’s brain – for a word that wasn’t there, a word he didn’t know. “I am the end of evolution of a race so old the time cannot be expressed in words that have meaning to your mind. A race fused into a single entity, eternal.

“An entity such as your primitive race might become—” again the groping for a word “—time from now. So might the race you call, in your mind, the Outsiders. So I intervene in the battle to come, the battle between fleets so evenly matched that destruction of both races will result. One must survive. One must progress and evolve.”

One? thought Carson. Mine or …

“It is in my power to stop the war, to send the Outsiders back to their galaxy. But they would return, or your race would sooner or later follow them there. Only by remaining in this space and time to intervene constantly could I prevent you from destroying one another, and I cannot remain.

“So I shall intervene now. I shall destroy one fleet completely without loss to the other. One civilization shall thus survive.”

Nightmare. This had to be nightmare, Carson thought. But he knew it wasn’t.

It was too mad, too impossible, to be anything but real.

He didn’t dare ask the question – which? But his thoughts asked it for him.

“The stronger shall survive,” said the voice. “That I cannot – and would not – change. I merely intervene to make it a complete victory, not—” groping again “—not Pyrrhic victory to a broken race.