The Mammoth Book of SF Wars (48 page)

Pinocchio droned, “Injured HORAR personnel will be delivered to the Command Post for Synthetic Biology Service attention,” but 2910 was no longer listening. In front of them he could hear what sounded like fifty bugles signalling for another Enemy attack.

The south side of the triangular camp was deserted, as though the remainder of their platoon had been called away to reinforce the First and Second; but with the sweeping illogic of war there was no Enemy where they might have entered unresisted.

“Request assistance from Synthetic Biology Service for injured HORAR personnel,” Pinocchio was saying. Talking did not interfere with his firing the 155, but when Brenner did not come out after a minute or more, 2910 managed to swing himself down, catching his weight on his good leg. Pinocchio rolled away at once.

The CP bunker was twisted out of shape, and he could see where several near-misses had come close to knocking it out completely. Brenner’s white face appeared in the doorway as he was about to go in. “Who’s that?”

“2910. I’ve been hit – let me come in and lie down.”

“They won’t send us an air strike. I radioed for one and they say this whole part of the country’s socked in; they say they wouldn’t be able to find us.”

“Get out of the door. I’m hit and I want to come in and lie down.” At the last moment he remembered to add, “Sir.”

Brenner moved reluctantly aside. It was dim in the bunker but not dark.

“You want me to look at that leg?”

2910 had found an empty stretcher, and he laid himself on it, moving awkwardly to keep from flexing his wound. “You don’t have to,” he said. “Look after some of the others.” It wouldn’t do for Brenner to begin poking around. Even rattled as he was he might notice something.

The SBS man went back to his radio instead. His frantic voice sounded remote and faint. It was ecstasy to lie down.

At some vast distance, voices were succeeding voices, argument meeting argument, far off. He wondered where he was.

Then he heard the guns and knew. He tried to roll onto his side and at the second attempt managed to do it, although the light-headedness was worse than ever. 2893 was lying on the stretcher next to him, and 2893 was dead.

At the other end of the room, the end that was technically the CP, he could hear Brenner talking to 2900. “If there were a chance,” Brenner was saying, “you know I’d do it, Platoon Leader.”

“What’s happening?” he asked. “What’s the matter?” He was too dazed to keep up the HORAR role well, but neither of them noticed.

“It’s a division,” Brenner said. “A whole Enemy division. We can’t hold off that kind of force.”

He raised himself on his elbow. “What do you mean?”

“I talked to them … I raised them on the radio, and it’s a whole division. They got one of their officers who could speak English to talk to me. They want us to surrender.”

“
They
say it’s a division, sir,” 2900 put in evenly.

2910 shook his head, trying to clear it. “Even if it were, with Pinocchio …”

“The Pinocchio’s gone.”

2900 said soberly, “We tried to counterattack, 2910, and they knocked Pinocchio and and threw us back. How are you feeling?”

“They’ve got at least a division,” Brenner repeated stubbornly.

2910’s mind was racing now, but it was as though it were running endless wind sprints on a treadmill. If Brenner were going to give up, 2900 would never even consider disobeying, no matter how much he might disagree. There were various ways, though, in which he could convince Brenner he was a human being – given time. And Brenner could, Brenner would, tell the Enemy, so that he too would be saved. Eventually the war would be over and he could go home. No one would blame him. If Brenner were going—

Brenner was asking, “How many effectives left?”

“Less than forty, sir.” There was nothing in 2900’s tone to indicate that a surrender meant certain death to him, but it was true. The Enemy took only human prisoners. (Could 2900 be convinced? Could he make any of the HORARS understand, when they had eaten and joked with him, knew no physiology, and thought all men not Enemy demigods? Would they believe him if he were to try to take command?)

He could see Brenner gnawing at his lower lip. “I’m going to surrender,” the SBS man said at last. A big one, mortar or bombardment rocket, exploded near the CP, but he appeared not to notice it. There was a wondering, hesitant note in his voice – as though he were still trying to accustom himself to the idea.

“Sir—” 2900 began.

“I forbid you to question my orders.” The SBS man sounded firmer now. “But I’ll ask them to make an exception this time, Platoon Leader. Not to do—” his voice faltered slightly “—what they usually do to nonhumans.”

“It’s not that,” 2900 said stolidly. “It’s the folding up. We don’t mind dying, sir, but we want to die fighting.”

One of the wounded moaned, and 2910 wondered for a moment, if he, like himself, had been listening.

Brenner’s self-control snapped. “You’ll die any damn way I tell you!”

“Wait.” It was suddenly difficult for 2910 to talk, but he managed to get their attention. “2900, Mr Brenner hasn’t actually ordered you to surrender yet, and you’re needed on the line. Go now and let me talk to him.” He saw the HORAR leader hesitate and added, “He can reach you on your helmet phone if he wants to; but go now and fight.”

With a jerky motion 2900 turned and ducked out the narrow bunker door. Brenner, taken by surprise, said, “What is it, 2910? What’s gotten into you?”

He tried to rise, but he was too weak. “Come here, Mr Brenner,” he said. When the SBS man did not move he added, “I know a way out.”

“Through the jungle?” Brenner scoffed in his shaken voice. “That’s absurd.” But he came. He leaned over the stretcher, and before he could catch his balance 2910 had pulled him down.

“What are you doing?”

“Can’t you tell? That’s the point of my trench knife you feel on your neck.”

Brenner tried to struggle, then subsided when the pressure of the knife became too great. “You … can’t … do this.”

“I can. Because I’m not a HORAR. I’m a man, Brenner, and it’s very important for you to understand that.” He felt rather than saw the look of incredulity on Brenner’s face. “I’m a reporter, and two years ago when the Simulations in this group were ready for activation I was planted among them. I trained with them and now I’ve fought with them, and if you’ve been reading the right magazine you must have seen some of the stories I’ve filed. And since you’re a civilian too, with no more right to command than I have, I’m taking charge.” He could sense Brenner’s swallow.

“Those stories were frauds – it’s a trick to gain public acceptance of the HORARS. Even back in Washington everybody in SBS knows about them.”

The chuckle hurt, but 2910 chuckled. “Then why’ve I got this knife at your neck, Mr Brenner?”

The SBS man was shaking. “Don’t you see how it was, 2910? No human could live as a HORAR does, running miles without tiring and only sleeping a couple of hours a night, so we did the next best thing. Believe me, I was briefed on it all when I was assigned to this camp; I know all about you, 2910.”

“What do you mean?”

“Damn it, let me go. You’re a HORAR, and you can’t treat a human like this.” He winced as the knife pressed cruelly against his throat, then blurted, “They couldn’t make a reporter a HORAR, so they
took
a HORAR. They took you, 2910, and made you a reporter. They implanted all the memories of an actual man in your mind at the same time they ran the regular instinct tapes. They gave you a soul, if you like, but you are a HORAR.”

“They must have thought that up as a cover for me, Brenner. That’s what they told you so you wouldn’t report it or try to deactivate me when I acted unlike the others. I’m a man.”

“You couldn’t be.”

“People are tougher than you think, Brenner; you’ve never tried.”

“I’m telling you—”

“Take the bandage off my leg.”

“What?”

He pressed again with the point of the knife. “The bandage. Take it off.”

When it was off he directed, “Now spread the lips of the wound.” With shaking fingers Brenner did so. “You see the bone? Go deeper if you have to. What is it?”

Brenner twisted his neck to look at him directly, his eyes rolling. “It’s stainless steel.”

2910 looked then and saw the bright metal at the bottom of the cleft of bleeding flesh; the knife slid into Brenner’s throat without resistance, almost as though it moved itself. He wiped the blade on Brenner’s dead arm before he sheathed it.

Ten minutes later when 2900 returned to the CP he said nothing; but 2910 saw his eyes and knew that 2900 knew. From his stretcher he said, “You’re in full command now.”

2900 glanced again at Brenner’s body. A second later he said slowly, “He was a sort of Enemy, wasn’t he? Because he wanted to surrender, and Lieutenant Kyle would never have done that.”

“Yes, he was.”

“But I couldn’t think of it that way while he was alive.” 2900 looked at him thoughtfully. “You know, you have something, 2910. A spark. Something the rest of us lack.” For a moment he fingered his chin with one huge hand. “That’s why I made you a squad leader; that and to get you out of some work, because sometimes you couldn’t keep up. But you’ve that spark, somehow.”

2910 said, “I know. How is it out there?”

“We’re still holding. How do you feel?”

“Dizzy. There’s a sort of black stuff all around the sides when I see. Listen, will you tell me something, if you can, before you go?”

“Of course.”

“If a human’s leg is broken very badly, what I believe they call a compound spiral fracture, is it possible for the human doctors to take out a section of the bone and replace it with a metal substitute?”

“I don’t know,” 2900 answered. “What does it matter?”

Vaguely 2910 said, “I think I knew of a football player once they did that to. At least, I seem now to remember it … I had forgotten for a moment.”

Outside the bugles were blowing again.

Near him the dying HORAR moaned.

An American news magazine sometimes carries, just inside its front cover among the advertisements, a column devoted to news of its own people. Two weeks after a correspondent named Thomas filed the last article of a series which had attracted national and even international attention, the following item appeared there:

The death of a staffer in war is no unique occurrence in the history of this publication, but there is a particular poignancy about that of the young man whose stories, paradoxically, to conceal his number have been signed only with his name (see PRESS). The airborne relief force, which arrived too late to save the camp at which he had resigned his humanity to work and fight, reports that he apparently died assisting the assigned SBS specialist in caring for the creatures whose lot he had, as nearly as a human can, made his own. Both he and the specialist were bayoneted when the camp was overrun.

THE TRAITOR

David Weber

David Weber sold his first novel in 1989. Since then he has seen more than forty novels and collaborative novels published and has established himself as one of the most respected and accomplished writers of military SF around. Weber has created many memorable characters, scenarios and universes, but it is the Honorverse, featuring the feisty, ever-resourceful but still very human Honor Harrington, that seems destined to be regarded as “classic”. In “The Traitor”, Weber contributes a typically action-packed episode to another classic series, that of Keith Laumer’s Bolos – the super-tanks that have achieved self-awareness.

So fasten your seat belts and enjoy the ride.

C
OLD, BONE-DRY WINTER
wind moaned as the titanic vehicle rumbled down the valley at a steady fifty kilometres per hour. Eight independent suspensions, four forward and four aft, spread across the full width of its gigantic hull, supported it, and each ten-metre-wide track sank deep into the soil of the valley floor. A dense cloud of dust – talcum-fine, abrasive and choking as death – plumed up from road wheels five metres high, but the moving mountain’s thirty-metre-high turret thrust its Hellbore clear of the churning cocoon. For all its size and power, it moved with unearthly quiet, and the only sounds were the whine of the wind, the soft purr of fusion-powered drive trains, the squeak of bogies, and the muted clatter of track links.

The Bolo ground forward, sensor heads swivelling, and the earth trembled with its passing. It rolled through thin, blowing smoke and the stench of high explosives with ponderous menace, altering course only to avoid the deepest craters and the twisted wrecks of alien fighting vehicles. In most places, those wrecks lay only in ones and twos; in others, they were heaped in shattered breastworks, clustered so thickly it was impossible to bypass them. When that happened, the eerie quiet of the Bolo’s advance vanished into the screaming anguish of crushing alloy as it forged straight ahead, trampling them under its 13,000 tons of death and destruction.

It reached an obstacle too large even for it to scale. Only a trained eye could have identified that torn and blasted corpse as another Bolo, turned broadside on to block the Enemy’s passage even in death, wrecked Hellbore still trained down the valley, missile cell hatches open on empty wells which had exhausted their ammunition. Fifteen enemy vehicles lay dead before it, mute testimony to the ferocity of its last stand, but the living Bolo didn’t even pause. There was no point, for the dead Bolo’s incandescent duralloy hull radiated the waste heat of the failing fusion bottle which had disembowelled it. Not even its unimaginably well-armoured Survival Centre could have survived, and the living Bolo simply altered heading to squeeze past it. Igneous rock cried out in pain as a moving, armoured flank scraped the valley face on one side, and the dead Bolo shuddered on the other as its brother’s weight shouldered it aside.