The Mammoth Book of SF Wars (62 page)

“It’s something to do with sex.”

“That’s it. Back in the oceans of their home world, male !Cha constructed elaborate nests to attract a mate. The strongest, those most likely to produce the fittest offspring, made the biggest and most elaborate nests. Simple, straight-ahead Darwinism. The !Cha left their home world a long time ago, but the males still have to prove their worth by finding something novel, something no other male has. They have a bad jones for Elder Culture junk, but these days they get a lot of useful stuff from us, too.”

“It’s lying about what it found,” Carver said. “It told me it lost it, but I know it has it hidden away inside that tank.”

Rider Jackson shook his head. “If it still had it, it would have killed you and paid off Mr Kanza. And it wouldn’t have called up the garrison back at Ganesh Five.”

“It did? Is that why the cutter came after us?”

“Why do you think traffic control spotted you so quickly? It told them what you were up to, and it told them all about my deal with Mr Kanza, too. Dana Sabah told me all about it when she tried to get me to surrender,” Rider Jackson said. “I guess our friend thought that involving the Navy would make the story more exciting.”

“Son-of-a-bitch. And I thought it was on my side because it owes me its life.”

“As far as it’s concerned, it doesn’t owe you anything. The only reason it stuck with you is because you have something it needs. Something as unique as any ancient artefact, something that can, it believes, win it a mate: the story of how you tried to escape.”

“Your own story is just as good, Lieutenant Jackson,” Useless Beauty said. “The two of you are enemies, as you said. Fight your duel. The winner will take me with him – I will pay well for it.”

Rider Jackson looked at Carver and smiled. “What do you think?”

“I think the war is over.” Carver was smiling too, remembering something Jarred had said. That peace was harder work than war, but more worthwhile.

Useless Beauty said, “I do not understand. You are enemies.”

Rider Jackson stuck his pistol in his belt. “Like he said, the war is over. Besides, we both want the same thing.”

Carver lowered the pistol he’d taken off Mr Kanza’s body and told the !Cha, “You’re like Mr Kanza. You think you own us, but you don’t understand us.”

“You must take me with you,” Useless Beauty said.

“It wants to find out how the story ends,” Rider Jackson told Carver.

“I will pay you well,” Useless Beauty said.

Carver shook his head. “We don’t need your money. We have the scow, and I have about thirty metres of a weird thread I took off Dr Smith’s body. It’s superconducting and very strong, and I can’t help wondering if it’s something you and her pulled out of Ganesh Five B.”

“I told you the truth about what we found,” Useless Beauty said. “It escaped us and destroyed our ship, but it did not survive. However, I admit this thread may be of interest. I must examine it, of course, but if it is material transformed during the destruction of the ship, I may be willing to purchase it.”

“That’s what I thought,” Carver said. “It may not be an Elder Culture artefact, but it could be worth something. And maybe the data from the probes I dropped into Ganesh Five B might be worth something, too.”

“I may be willing to purchase that, too,” Useless Beauty said. “As a souvenir.”

“What do you think?” Carver said to Rider Jackson.

“I think we’ll get a better price on the open market.”

“I can force you to take me,” Useless Beauty said.

“No, you can’t,” Carver said.

“And even if you could, it would ruin the ending of your story,” Rider Jackson said. “I’m sure the settlers or the Navy will rescue you, for a price.”

There was a long moment of silence. Then Useless Beauty said, “I would like to know what happens after you escape. I will pay well.”

“If we escape,” Carver said. “We have to get past the cutter.”

“Dana Sabah’s a good pilot, but I’m better,” Rider Jackson said. “I reckon you are too.”

“Before we do this, we need to work out where we’re going.”

“That’s pretty easy, given that you’re an indentured worker and

the Navy wants my ass. Think that Kanza’s old boat will get us to the Alliance?”

“It just might.”

The two men grinned at each other. Then they ran for the scow.

TIME PIECE

Joe Haldeman

If starships can instantly jump interstellar distances yet nevertheless Einstein is not violated, interstellar war will displace its soldiers far from their home times …

“Time Piece” was the trial run for the basic idea behind Haldeman’s classic novel
The Forever War,
which won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards in 1975. A combat engineer during the Vietnam conflict, this was his second professional publication, pregnant with much. Since the early eighties he has spent nine months of the year writing full-time, the rest as an adjunct professor in the Writing and Humanistic Studies programme at MIT. Of his thirty or so books written in about forty years to date, all but four have been SF. As of early 2011, six bookcases held one copy each of every book and magazine he appeared in, a total of fifty-eight shelf feet, which might seem almost a forever shelf to writers starting out.

T
HEY SAY YOU’VE
got a fifty–fifty chance every time you go out. That makes it once chance in eight that you’ll live to see your third furlough; the one I’m on now.

Somehow the odds don’t keep people from trying to join. Even though not one in a thousand gets through the years of training and examination, there’s no shortage of cannon fodder. And that’s what we are. The most expensive, best trained cannon fodder in the history of warfare. Human history, anyhow; who can speak for the enemy?

I don’t even call them snails any more. And the thought of them doesn’t trigger that instant flash of revulsion, hate, kill-fever – the psyconditioning wore off years ago, and they didn’t renew it. They’ve stopped doing it to new recruits; no percentage in berserkers. I was a wild one the first couple of trips, though.

Strange world I’ve come back to. Gets stranger every time, of course. Even sitting here in a bogus twenty-first-century bar, where everyone speaks Basic and there’s real wood on the walls and peaceful holograms instead of plugins, and music made by men …

But it leaks through. I don’t pay by card, let alone by coin. The credit register monitors my alpha waves and communicates with the bank every time I order a drink. And, in case I’ve become addicted to more modern vices, there’s a feelie matrix (modified to look like an old-fashioned visiphone booth) where I can have my brain stimulated. Thanks but no, thanks – always get this picture of dirty hands inside my skull, kneading, rubbing. Like when you get too close to the enemy and they open a hole in your mind and you go spinning down and down and never reach the bottom till you die. I almost got too close last time.

We were on a three-man reconnaissance patrol, bound for a hellish little planet circling the red giant Antares. Now red giant stars don’t form planets in the natural course of things, so we had ignored Antares; we control most of the space around it, so why waste time in idle exploration? But the enemy had detected this little planet – God knows how – and about ten years after they landed there, we monitored their presence (gravity waves from the ships’ braking) and my team was assigned the reconnaissance. Three men against many, many of the enemy – but we weren’t supposed to fight if we could help it; just take a look around, record what we saw, and leave a message beacon on our way back, about a light-year out from Antares. Theoretically, the troopship following us by a month will pick up the information and use it to put together a battle plan. Actually, three more recon patrols precede the troop ship at one-week intervals; insurance against the high probability that any one patrol will be caught and destroyed. As the first team in, we have a pretty good chance of success, but the ones to follow would be in trouble if we didn’t get back out. We’d be past caring, of course: the enemy doesn’t take prisoners.

We came out of lightspeed close to Antares, so the bulk of the star would mask our braking disturbance, and inserted the ship in a hyperbolic orbit that would get us to the planet – Anomaly, we were calling it – in about twenty hours.

“Anomaly must be tropical over most of its surface.” Fred Sykes, nominally the navigator, was talking to himself and at the two of us while he analysed the observational data rolling out of the ship’s computer. “No axial tilt to speak of. Looks like they’ve got a big outpost near the equator, lots of electromagnetic noise there. Figures … the goddamn snails like it hot. We requisitioned hot-weather gear, didn’t we, Pancho?”

Pancho, that’s me. “No, Fred, all we got’s parkas and snow-shoes.” My full name is Francisco Jesus Mario Juan-José Hugo de Naranja, and I outrank Fred, so he should at least call me Francisco. But I’ve never pressed the point. Pancho it is. Fred looked up from his figure and the rookie, Paul Spiegel, almost dropped the pistol was cleaning.

“But why …” Paul was staring. “We knew the planet was probably Earthlike if the enemy wanted it. Are we gonna have to go tromping around in spacesuits?”

“No, Paul, our esteemed leader and supply clerk is being sarcastic again.” He turned back to his computer. “Explain, Pancho.”

“No, that’s all right.” Paul reddened a bit and also went back to his job. “I remember you complaining about having to take the standard survival issue.”

“Well, I was right then and I’m doubly right now. We’ve
got
parkas back there, and snowshoes, and a complete terranorm environment recirculator, and everything else we could possibly need to walk around in comfort on every planet known to man –
Dios
! That issue masses over a metric ton, more than a bevawatt laser. A laser we could use, but crampons and pith helmets and elephant guns …”

Paul looked up again. “Elephant guns?” He was kind of a freak about weapons.

“Yeah.”

“That’s a gun that shoots elephants?”

“Right. An elephant gun shoots elephants.”

“Is that some new kind of ammunition?”

I sighed, I really sighed. You’d think I’d get used to this after twelve years – or four hundred – in the service. “No, kid, elephants were animals, big grey wrinkled animals with horns. You used an elephant gun to shoot
at
them.

“When I was a kid in Rioplex, back in the twenty-first, we had an elephant in the zoo; used to go down in the summer and feed him synthos through the bars. He had a long nose like a fat tail; he ate with that.”

“What planet were they from?”

It went on like that for a while. It was Paul’s first trip out, and he hadn’t yet gotten used to the idea most of his compatriots were genuine antiques, preserved by the natural process of relativity. At lightspeed you age imperceptibly, while the universe’s calendar adds a year for every light-year you travel. Seems like cheating. But it catches up with you eventually.

We hit the atmosphere of Anomaly at an oblique angle and came in passive, like a natural meteor, until we got to a position where we were reasonably safe from detection (just above the south polar sea), then blasted briefly to slow down and splash. Then we spent a few hours in slow flight at sea level, sneaking up on their settlement.

It appeared to be the only enemy camp on the whole planet, which was typical. Strange for a spacefaring, aggressive race to be so incurious about planetary environments, but they always seemed to settle in one place and simply expand radially. And they do expand; their reproduction rate makes rabbits look sick. Starting from one colony, they can fill a world in two hundred years. After that, they control their population by infantiphage and stellar migration.

We landed about a hundred kilometres from the edge of their colony, around local midnight. While we were outside setting up the espionage monitors, the ship camouflaged itself to match the surrounding jungle optically, thermally, magnetically, etc. – we were careful not to get too far from the ship; it can be a bit hard to find even when you know where to look.

The monitors were to be fed information from flea-sized flying robots, each with a special purpose, and it would take several hours for them to wing into the city. We posted a one-man guard, one-hour shifts; the other two inside the ship until the monitors started clicking. But they never started.

Being senior, I took the first watch. A spooky hour, the jungle making dark little noises all around, but nothing happened. Then Fred stood the next hour, while I put on the deepsleep helmet. Figured I’d need the sleep – once data started coming in, I’d have to be alert for about forty hours. We could all sleep for a week once we got off Anomaly and hit lightspeed.

Getting yanked out of deepsleep is like an ice-water douche to the brain. The black nothing dissolved and there was Fred a foot away from my face, yelling my name over and over. As soon as he saw my eyes open, he ran for the open lock, priming his laser on the way (definitely against regulations, could hole the hull that way; I started to say something but couldn’t form the words). Anyhow, what were we doing in free fall? And how could Fred run across the deck like that while we were in free fall?

Then my mind started coming back into focus and I could analyse the sinking, spinning sensation – not free-fall vertigo at all, but what we used to call snail-fever. The enemy was very near. Crackling combat sounds drifted in from outdoors.

I sat up on the cot and tried to sort everything out and get going. After long seconds my arms and legs got the idea; I struggled up and staggered to the weapons cabinet. Both the lasers were gone, and the only heavy weapon left was a grenade launcher. I lifted it from the rack and made my way to the lock.

Had I been thinking straight, I would’ve just sealed the lock and blasted – the presence in my mind was so strong that I should have known there were too many of the enemy, too close, for us to stand and fight. But no one can think while their brain is being curdled that way. I fought the urge to just let go and fall down that hole in my mind, and slid along the wall to the airlock. By the time I got there my teeth were chattering uncontrollably and my face was wet with tears.