Soldiers

Chapter 41

Harvesting Trouble

Captain (Lieutenant Commander) Christiaan Weygand's handling of the Survey ship Vitus Bering reflected several astrogational facts of life. Warpspace differs from hyperspace in many ways besides the number of dimensions. For Weygand's purposes, four of those differences were decisive. (1) Hyperspace drive is far "faster" than warpdrive (which in turn is far "faster" than gravdrive). (2) In hyperspace, astrogation is approximate, with vagaries whose effects accumulate over the duration of a jump, while in warpspace, astrogation is quite precise. (3) In warpspace, the F-space potentiality is far less distorted by nearby planetary masses. With sufficient skill and care, one can venture minutely near a planetary mass. In hyperspace, approaching as near as a million miles to a planet no larger than Pluto would destroy the ship. And (4), warpdrive is suitable for covert encroachment, particularly since warpspace does not produce emergence waves in the warp-space potentiality.

Thus Weygand had first brought the Bering out of hyperspace two weeks short of the Tagus System, after a forty-seven-week jump. It was time to locate himself in F-space-familiar space, "real" space-and take a new set of astrogational readings. It was common to think of it in golfing terms, as sizing up the "lie" before hitting the approach shot-the final hyperspace jump to the Tagus System.

Then he'd generated hyperspace again, to reemerge in the system's remote fringe-far enough out that the Bering's hyperspace emergence waves would be undetectable on Tagus.

Theoretically of course, the Wyzhnyny could surround the system with alarm buoys or picket boats parked twelve or fifteen billion miles out, in the cometary cloud. But given the enormous spherical surface that went with such a radius, to provide and place the necessary number of sentries would be impractical at best.

Survey ships had some drawbacks for such missions, but one decisive advantage: their superb instrumentation. Even from where she'd emerged, 29 billion miles from the primary, the Bering could plot the orbits of the system's planets and major satellites. And do it in a few hours, applying the mechanics of planetary systems to the tiny orbital segments observed. The info was necessary for the warpspace "chip shot" Weygand made next.

That chip shot-that warpspace jump-took more than a day to bring the Bering near enough to Tagus's sole moon to detect it in the F-space potentiality. But once in F-space, and so near to Tagus, the ship's electromagnetic output could quickly be detected from the planet's surface, or by ships in the vicinity. And Drago Dravec's experience had been that the Wyzhnyny left a space force at their colonies. Something one might assume without evidence.

Weygand had known all that since he'd been given his first mission briefing, a year earlier. It hadn't troubled him then, and it didn't now. He ordered key personnel wakened from stasis, and still in warpspace, maneuvered into the lee of the moon before emerging. Hidden from the planet, less than a mile from the lunar surface. Which just now was the bright side, for on Tagus, the moon was near the "new" phase.

After a brief sensor scan, he landed.

Now come the real challenges, he told himself. Find the Wyzhnyny colony at the old pirate base. Put down a team to collect hornets and bring them back to the Bering, which was to remain behind the moon. Then send marines down to take some Wyzhnyny prisoners and bring them up. After that, he'd generate warpspace, the science team could start their examinations, and they'd all fly home.

Simple but not easy. The hornets alone sounded daunting; Weygand had had a lifelong aversion to stinging insects, and Morgan had said the Tagus hornets were as big as his thumb. But with decent luck they could capture their hornets and be gone without the Wyzhnyny knowing they'd been there. Capturing Wyzhnyny, on the other hand… that would bring them into physical contact with the enemy. He carried two squads of marine commandos in stasis, under a captain, with gunnery sergeants as squad leaders. Two squads! How many fighting personnel did the Wyzhnyny have on Tagus? A division? Half a dozen divisions?

But War House wants those prisoners, he thought. And what do I know? I'm a Survey skipper, not a general.

A lot depended on how slack the Wyzhnyny had become here, after a Standard year without anything resembling a threat. Because if any of them-the Bering, the scout, the collection boat-caught the Wyzhnyny's attention, the prospect of getting away with prisoners would be nil.

"Captain, sir," said a man behind him, "the personnel you requested are being revived."

Weygand swiveled his command chair halfway around. "Thank you, Chief. And the steward?"

"The steward is preparing their meal."

"Good. Tell Captain Stoorvol I want to talk with him as soon as he's finished eating."

There was no rush, but the sooner done, the sooner gone.

They'd drilled the procedure back in the Sol System. The Bering had emerged off Luna's far side (and been snooped by a police craft from nearby Yerikalin Dome). The Tagus rainforest had been represented by the Maranon Ecological Benchmark Preserve, in Terra's Peruvian Autonomy. And to make the drill complete, the hornet team had returned (illegally) with a bunch of outraged Terran hornets. None had been the size of a man's thumb, but they were big-time mean.

There too it had been Captain Paul Stoorvol who'd piloted the short-range scout, SRS 12/1. And beside him, as here, had been Alfhild Olavsdottir, blond and perhaps forty years old, stocky and fit-looking. Now as then, Stoorvol guided the scout smoothly across the lunar gravitic field, veering around occasional topographic obstacles, then slowing as he approached the limb of the moon. He stopped when he'd cleared it, parking a bare hundred feet off the surface.

From there they got their first look at Tagus, a little less than 170,000 miles away. Alfhild Olavsdottir inhaled sharply. "Holy Gaea!" she said. "It's gorgeous!"

Her oath annoyed Stoorvol; he disliked Gaeans. But the annoyance was remote; his feelings were often somewhat remote. Besides, lots of non-Gaeans used that oath, and somehow Alfhild Olavsdottir didn't strike him as a Gaean. A deist maybe. Deism was supposed to be big among scientists.

At any rate she was right: Tagus was beautiful. Colonized worlds invariably were; it went with being Terra-like. At the moment, what dominated his view of Tagus was the world ocean-a vivid blue with white cyclonic swirls. The equatorial zone showed a modest continent whose predominant blue-green suggested heavy forest.

After perhaps ten seconds of planet gazing, Stoorvol called up his instrument display, checking for technical electronic activity. He found plenty, from a single south-coast locale. Two other sources appeared that the scout's shipsmind identified as surveillance buoys parked above the equator at an altitude of 4,600 miles. He marked their locations with icons, but just now his primary interest was the surface location. Centering it on his screen, he magnified the site. It was nearly rectangular, a six by eight-mile area cleared of forest-distinct enough to be measured by his scanner from 170,000 miles out. He marked it with another icon.

"That's probably the colony," he said. "Or one of them. We'll have to check the other hemisphere, but except for size, this one fits Morgan's site description. It's equatorial and on a south-coast headland-an open block with forest on two sides, the ocean on a third, and an inlet on the fourth."

Olavsdottir nodded. "It's hard to imagine a natural opening looking like that."

Stoorvol held the scout where it was, and they kept alternate, one-hour watches. Whoever wasn't on watch used the main cabin to nap, snack, exercise, or otherwise break the monotony. The scout's shipsmind didn't experience time in the same way humans do, and it also had external tasks. It assigned an arbitrary meridian to Tagus, bisecting the visible Wyzhnyny settlement. With that and the equator as references, it mapped the gravitic matrix and what could be seen of the surface-topographic and water features, broad vegetation types-along with much that didn't show on the surface, including gravitic and magnetic gradients and anomalies.

And recorded the frequency bands of Wyzhnyny radio traffic.

The humans, on the other hand, had no duties except to watch the sensor display and the planet itself. It was an invitation to drowse, so an alarm had been provided. The watch wore a communications earpiece, and when anything broke the slow and regular unfolding of the sensor pickups, an alarm ruptured any doze or inattention.

To ease the monotony, Alfhild Olavsdottir recited, in a quiet voice, extensively from the Icelandic sogur-the sagas. More than any other Europeans, even the Finns, the Icelanders had retained their old language as the primary domestic, social, and cultural idiom. Terran was their language of science, business, and the world at large. As for daydreaming-Olavsdottir could be an enthusiastic, even a formidable lover, but she seldom fantasized sex. Except occasionally to compose erotic poetry about some lover in her past. But she did not do that here.

On his watches, Stoorvol's thoughts included women, Alfhild Olavsdottir for one. She was a lot older than he-ten or so years-but interesting. According to the skipper, she was a Ph.D. planetologist with a bachelor's in invertebrate zoology. The academic degrees had made her eligible for this mission, but no more eligible than many others. What had made the difference, Weygand said, was her temperament, and her record as a field leader. "Those, and being smart as they get."

Smart, Stoorvol thought, meant different things to different people. But she'd made a good impression on him when they'd boarded the scout and she'd seen him stash his rucker in a locker. "Why the rucksack?" she'd asked. He'd always resented gratuitous requests to explain himself, certainly from people he didn't know well. So he'd simply said it held things he might need, and with a nod she'd let it go at that.

Besides thinking about women, he revisited old conflicts-fierce rivalries as a kid growing up; fistfights at boot camp and on pass; and later, one at the Academy, where fights were seriously frowned on. He'd almost always won, but the last had nearly gotten him expelled. He'd been young then, he told himself. He looked at things differently from the vantage of twenty-eight years.

And he thought about the collection missions-the collection of hornets and the collection of prisoners. (He was to protect the first mission and lead the second.) If everything went according to drill… Things seldom did, of course. It wasn't wise to rely on scripts. They were fine as a starting place, and even as a guide, but they weren't likely to survive a complete mission. Major Asahara had stressed that in Military Planning 202. Because others, notably the enemy, had their own scripts, and typically the physical universe added serious unforeseens. Things happened, and necessity often demanded snap decisions, with different people commonly responding differently. And in case his cadets didn't believe him, Asahara, as game master in their electronic war game labs, would throw in unforeseeables that required unexpected and often drastic improvisations: new tactics, new strategies, even new objectives.

Stoorvol could still quote the major, or nearly enough to make no difference: "Say you have a battle plan that will win this major battle for you. And a seriously chancy departure from it that, if successful, could win the war; but, if unsuccessful, would be a disaster. Discuss the factors in choosing, and create examples."

For days the class had gone round and round on that. It had been the most valuable discussion they'd had. And among the factors had been alien mentalities. Because if they ever fought a war-a real war, a serious war-it would be against alien invaders. None of them doubted it. It was the truism behind every plan War House made, everything it did. It had been for centuries.

In Stoorvol's ruminations, any verbalization was silent and in Terran. As with most Terrans, Terran was his only language. Olavsdottir had commented that his surname looked Norwegian with an Americanized spelling, probably from the late 19th or early 20th century. That had been news to him. The Americas had been Terra's great ethnic melting pot; the rest of the world was only now catching up. He'd never wondered about his ancestry, which besides various European roots, included Dakotah, Ibo, Samoan and Kachin.

Hour by hour, the Wyzhnyny settlement site crept across the face of Tagus, toward the terminator near the east limb of the visible hemisphere. Before the continent disappeared, a larger edged into sight. On the same watch, a settlement appeared on the new continent, and later a third, both marked by electronic activity. One was at a northern latitude, in what appeared to be a steppe. The other was in a large basin between two high, subtropical mountain ranges. Neither was at all like the tropical rainforest Morgan had described.

"So," Stoorvol said, "now the question is whether there's a fourth one down there somewhere."

Some hours later they were satisfied there wasn't. The first one was the right one. Meanwhile they'd learned the number of surveillance buoys parked off the planet-four of them, located to provide coverage of the colonized continents.

Their next task was to scout Tagus's surface. Stoorvol was about to generate warpdrive when they learned there were indeed Wyzhnyny warships in the system. Their sensors picked up one of them a scant few hundred miles from where they watched in SRS 12/1. It was departing Tagus's single moon, and crossing to the planet in gravdrive. Why the Wyzhnyny had been on the moon, or very near it, and whether others still lurked there, neither Terran knew.

So instead of generating warpspace and crossing invisibly to Tagus, Stoorvol backed away in gravdrive, then returned to the Bering with a short warp jump, to let the captain know about the Wyzhnyny ship.

Captain Weygand promptly sent another two-man team out in SRS 12/2, to watch from the limb.

After listening to Stoorvol and Olavsdottir, he decided to skip the surface scouting. With four Wyzhnyny surveillance buoys, and possibly a space force on the moon's nearside, they might very well get only one chance before having to flee the system. So the first crossing would be for hornet collection-much the most feasible and least dangerous of their two missions.

The logic was inescapable, but it left Stoorvol ill at ease. In his heart of hearts, the most dangerous foray held priority, and at any rate, live Wyzhnyny prisoners seemed more valuable than hornets to the war effort.

Some hours later, the hornet collection team boarded the 46-foot collection boat, the Mei-Li, sometimes termed "the nursing whale" because she was carried outboard. The hornet collection team consisted of Alfhild Olavsdottir and two entomology techs, plus both squads of marine commandos for ground security. Paul Stoorvol would pilot the crossing, with PO1 Achmed Menges as copilot. Two weapons techs rode in the Mei-Li's gun bubbles.

Slipping the magnetic tie that held the Mei-Li to the gangway lock, Stoorvol separated from the Bering. At 200 feet from the surface, he activated the strange-space generator for warpdrive. Then departed the vicinity of the Bering much faster than he would have in gravdrive, though not remotely approaching full warpspeed. Not this close to planetary bodies. Invisible from F-space, they quickly cleared the limb, and saw Tagus again on their screens. Not as a blue and white sphere against deep, star-strewn black, but a computer artifact-a featureless silver globe against utterly starless indigo blue. Shipsmind could mock up something very similar to the planet's F-space appearance, even dubbing in star images. But the Admiralty specified silver on indigo for simulations in warpspace, to remind the watch it wasn't real.

At the Marine Academy, Captain Esteron had shown them a screen full of mathematics, telling them it best represented the warpspace view of a planet. He hadn't expected them to sort it out. He'd simply been making a point. He went on to discuss warpspace in non-mathematical terms. In a sense, you couldn't be in warpspace; warpspace has no material content. A ship "in warpspace" actually occupied an anomaly. Before generating warpspace, you're in F-space-familiar space-which is "permeated by the warpspace potentiality." The strange-space generator generates what can be thought of as a "bubble" of warpspace, which is free to move within the warpspace potentiality at "speeds" greater than light in F-space. And that "carrier bubble" of warpspace contains an inclusion-a bubble of F-space intimately surrounding the scout and its contents. A ship within a bubble within a bubble.

According to Captain Esteron, it could be understood only through the appropriate mathematics, and even that depended on what's meant by "understood." The bottom line was, you can leave Terra in warpdrive and arrive at Alpha Centauri in far less time than a photon could. And without inertia. In warpspace you're not only exempt from the light-speed limitation, your ship is stationary within its own little universe-its "carrier bubble."

Stoorvol had decided then not to worry about it. Accept it, yes. Get used to it, sure. Learn to control it, damn right! He'd quickly done all three, and become a competent warpspace pilot-not very difficult in routine circumstances.

Especially with the safekeeps built into shipsminds, to constrain warpspeeds in the vicinity of planetary bodies. For there, the "interfacing" of F-space and warpspace is more or less distorted, and pseudo-speeds must be moderate. Otherwise distortion could rupture your carrier bubble. Which could leave you abruptly in F-space, with momentum a function of your warpdrive pseudo-speed. If that happens at a pseudo-speed greater than c, ship and contents are converted instantly into energy. The resulting explosion is terrific.

Even at only a few-score miles per minute, a ruptured carrier bubble would convert a crew into strawberry jam.

Thus the crossing to Tagus took twenty-eight careful minutes. But they were also twenty-eight invisible minutes. The odds of a Wyzhnyny ship passing in warpspace near enough to detect your carrier bubble by chance were extremely low. While the prospect of being detected in warpspace by a ship in F-space was essentially nil.

The danger lay not in the crossing to Tagus. It lay in the fine maneuvering very close in. There, complex interface distortions made travel vectors tricky, and carelessness or clumsiness could easily be fatal.

So while the crossing took twenty-eight minutes, finding a suitable place to emerge required two hours of slow and careful sensor groping. Finally Stoorvol found what he wanted-a gorge. He recognized it by the nature of the grav-line distortions in the F-space potentiality, blurred though they were, and it was on the right part of the right continent. He groped his way almost to the bottom.

Emergence would cause a momentary surge of 80-kilocycle radio waves, a distinctive artifact that would hardly be misinterpreted. It was the primary reason he'd wanted to emerge deep in a gorge. A surge there would hardly be picked up by a ground installation, nor by any of the surveillance buoys, given their positions in space.

Once back in F-space, he keyed the gravitic matrix, and shipsmind gave him coordinates-0.65 degrees east of the Wyzhnyny settlement. The gorge was visible on the map the scout had generated during its surveillance from the lunar limb. It was one of the larger gorges leading down from a broad basaltic plateau to the ocean, and the Mei-Li had emerged only thirty feet from the bottom.

He turned the helm over to PO-1 Menges, who raised the craft almost to the rim. Then two of the Mei-Li's work scooters transferred the marines, plus Olavsdottir and the two entomology techs, to the plateau top. Stoorvol flew one of the scooters.

He left most of the marines on the rim with Gunnery Sergeant Gabaldon, to set up an inconspicuous defense point. Then, with Olavsdottir, two marines and a pair of hornet traps, Stoorvol left on one scooter. Three other marines and both entomology techs followed on the other, with four more traps. The scouts' gravdrives were designed to have a minimal EM signature, though even that might be picked up if they rose much above the rainforest canopy.

"Just tell me where to go," Stoorvol said. Olavsdottir scanned across the forest roof. "Take me higher," she said. "I can't see enough from here."

He glanced at the coordinate grid on his display, then raised the scooter straight up, while the planetologist looked around. At two hundred feet above the forest she spoke again, pointing. "There," she said. "There's a pretty good opening over there about half a mile."

He saw where she meant: a two-acre gap in the forest canopy, probably a blowdown patch. "Right," he said, and took the scooter down almost to the treetops before heading there, dodging the occasional emergent that loomed above its leafy neighbors.

The gap proved unsuitable, filled with a dense growth of young forest half as tall as the surrounding older stand. They traveled several miles and checked four more gaps before they crossed a long low ridge and saw what they needed. A mile ahead, on the far side of a smaller gorge, a sizeable area of forest had burned. As they drew near, Olavsdottir said, "That's it. Set her down there."

They landed near the center, away from the gorge. Clearly the fire had been intense. It seemed to Stoorvol he knew the place from Morgan's reports. This lesser gorge was the approach to the old pirate base. And the fire? The Wyzhnyny had razed the forest there after they'd traced Morgan to his bolt hole.

Olavsdottir wasn't speculating on the burn's origin. She was soaking in its ecology. The forest regrowth was still patchy; much of the ground was covered with herbage and low shrubs. Flowers were rampant, and "berries" abundant. Insects in quantity visited both, probing blossoms or tapping fruit juices with their proboscises. There would be hornets, she was sure. And if they were nearly as large as Morgan had described, they'd be predators, preying on other "insects."

She turned to the field entomologists. "This is it, people," she said. "Let's do it." From her small day pack she took something that, unfolded, proved to be a hat with a net rolled on its brim. Putting it on, she secured the net around her collar, then donned tough gloves. The techs did the same.

Then she turned to the scooters where the marines stood watching with their captain. "Stay here," she told Stoorvol, "and leave your repellent fields off. They disorient insect behavior over an area a lot larger than the repellent radius."

Stoorvol watched the hooded collectors walk off in different directions across the burn, heads swiveling slowly as they searched. Sergeant Haynes grunted. "She didn't need to tell us that. We know the drill."

"She's not used to the Corps," Stoorvol said, "and civilians generally need reminding. Otherwise no telling what they'd do."

He'd hardly said it when his radio beeped. He took it from his belt. Its transmitter was directional, so he pointed it east. "Stoorvol," he answered. "This had better be good. If I can read your signal, they can pick it up at the Wyzhnyny base."

"Captain, a bogie just passed over!" The voice was Menges'. "Crossed the gorge about two hundred yards north, headed west! If anyone on board was looking our way, he'd have seen us. Or if they had their sensors on… They shouldn't pick up our radio traffic though. Way different wavelengths."

Unless they're scanning. "What kind of bogey?"

"A smallish craft of some sort, sir."

A smallish craft. That could be different things, some armed, some not. "Thanks, Boats. Gabaldon, are you on?"

Sergeant Gabaldon answered from the rim. "Right, Captain."

"Okay. Listen up both of you. They probably didn't see you. Otherwise they wouldn't have gone right on like they did." I hope, he added silently. "Gabaldon, get your people back aboard the Mei-Li, now! Boats, as soon as they're on board, fly south down the gorge, a mile at least, and even with the rim. Find a place where you can fit that frigging barge back into the forest, between the trees. Far enough back that you can't be seen from the gorge. Or from the air." And let's hope the Wyzhnyny don't scan the forest with grav sensors. "Another thing: when you're in your hiding place, register your coordinates to four decimals. But don't send them till I ask. Keep radio silence. Got that?"

"Yessir," Menges said. "Radio silence. Are you coming back now, sir?"

"Hell no! We've got hornets to catch! Now remember: don't send again till I tell you. Stoorvol out."

He looked toward Olavsdottir moving slowly across the burn, and clicked his helmet mike. "Doctor, a bogey may have spotted the Mei-Li. I'm moving both scooters under the trees. Continue as you are. If I trigger my alarm, crouch down and make yourselves as small as possible. And don't-repeat don't-flatten yourself on the ground."

"Thank you, Captain," she answered.

Thank you, Captain? For what? Doing my job? Stoorvol powered up his gravdrive. Don't knock courtesy, he chided himself. Sergeant Haynes started his scooter, too, and they headed for the burn's nearest edge. There, back beneath the trees, they set down about a hundred feet apart. From the burn came a pleased shout: an entomologist had found a hornet's nest. Stoorvol hoped to hell they'd get what they needed quickly. He wanted to get back to the Mei-Li and off the planet as soon as possible. The collection order called for six nests-for statistical reasons, he supposed. It could keep them out there till dark, which meant till morning. A disturbing possibility.

Achmed Menges found a suitable location, unloaded his marines again, and had two of them guide him between the trees until he saw a glade ahead. He stopped sixty or eighty feet short of it, with a clear shot to scram if he needed to. By that time the gorge was a hundred yards behind him, and marine lookouts at the rim could no longer see the boat. Menges shut down all systems except shipsmind, to reduce detection risks, then waited while the Mei-Li grew slowly hot and stuffy.

On being relieved, Tech 1 Gortha turned his log over to the new watch officer. The Wyzhnyny ensign glanced at it. "What is this?" he asked.

Gortha didn't need to look. He'd logged just one item that wasn't routine. "It's a call from the courier bringing Colonel Dorthut from Grasslands, sir. While crossing High Falls Gorge, the pilot spotted a wrecked alien craft in the bottom."

The ensign's hackles rose. "Wrecked alien craft? How did he know?"

"I suppose, sir, because none of ours is reported missing. And because there are no aliens left on the planet."

"You suppose?" The ensign's jaw muscles bulged like melon rinds along his cranial keel. The observation had been radioed in nearly five hours earlier. Such a lapse was intolerable. Reaching to the work station keyboard, he tapped three keys.

A voice issued from the desk speaker. "Dispatcher's station, Tech 1 Rrunch."

"Rrunch, this is the officer of the watch. The dispatcher you relieved-is he still there?"

"No, sir. He just left, sir."

"Get him! Now!"

"Yessir!"

The ensign heard the quick soft thudding of feet, and waited scowling, fists clenching and unclenching. There were more footfalls, then a voice. "Tech 3 Agthok, sir. How can I help you?"

"Who piloted the courier from Grasslands?"

"Tech 2 Kroliss, sir."

"How can he be found? Promptly?"

"Sir, I saw him enter the messroom about… forty minutes ago."

"Thank you." The ensign bit the words out and disconnected, then with an angry finger stabbed more keys. "This is the officer of the watch. I must speak to Tech 2 Kroliss at once."

"He just left, sir, carrying a mug of something."

"Go and get him! Tell him the watch officer wants him at the watch office NOW! And call me when you've done it!"

"Yessir!"

An unpleasant rumble issued from the watch officer's throat as he disconnected. A mug of something! he thought. As if I had any interest in that!

Tech 1 Gortha was glad Ensign Rrishnex wasn't on his watch. But he didn't ask permission to leave. He'd slip away after Kroliss arrived. He wondered why the ensign didn't just order someone else out to investigate. Probably, he decided, because Kroliss could find the place more surely.

Gosthodar Qishkur, Governor of the Okaldei, lay on his AG couch with his torso upright. His eyes were obscured by their nictitating membranes, and his upper torso rocked back and forth like a dodderer's. Not a reassuring sight, thought General Gransatt.

"If it was mine to decide?" Gransatt asked. He was tempted to answer falsely, for it seemed to him the gosthodar would order the opposite of whatever he recommended. But he would not lie; not so blatantly.

"Lordship," he said, "I would order all scouts and all fighter craft to muster here. Then search the plateau between the Broken Hills and Long Inlet on the west, and the Green River on the east. Search it so that nothing living avoids detection. All attack squadrons to be on two-hour stepped alert, ready to destroy any aliens sighted. Until we find the alien and wipe him out, or are very very sure he does not exist."

The gosthodar's rocking increased, the sight transfixing his general. After a long moment the gosthodar spoke, his voice reflecting his age. "I thought we did all that a cycle ago," he said. "Was that not you in charge?"

Gransatt's hide heated; it required effort to avoid bristling. "That was not comparable. Then we needed to search the entire planet. A single region can be searched far more thoroughly."

The gosthodar ignored the general's omission of the honorific. "Mmmm. But that first scouring-did it not begin with an intensive search first of this very region, then that of Grasslands and Basin? And despite all that, was an alien not found reconnoitering this very settlement some weeks later?" Qishkur had stopped rocking, and his eyes had cleared. "You say you would make very very sure he is wiped out. That he ceases to exist. But what does such certainty mean? You were very sure before, and I accepted that. Until suddenly, there came the alien who had hidden under the hill. Then he died, and you were very very sure. But I was no longer so sure anymore. Eh?"

The general's hide felt hot as fire. He did not reply.

"And now this. How can you have so much certainty about what you will accomplish this time, and so little in what you accomplished before?" Briefly his head swayed from side to side in rejection. "I, on the other hand, believe you did well before, you and your fliers. Not perfectly it seems, but well. This was an alien outpost world, nothing more. There were no towers. No ghats. Not even towns. There were never more than a few sophonts here, and your fighters killed most of them. The few survivors, those who did not succeed in fleeing the planet, scattered to different regions, where they have hidden. In caverns no doubt. It seems they have an affinity for caverns.

"But they cannot hide forever. They must surface, walk beneath the sky, bath in the streams"-his words slowed for emphasis-"and grow food. And when they do, our surveillance buoys will find them. The aliens know this. They are not ignorant primitives. This appearance today-if it is real; if the report is not an aberration-this appearance is an act of desperation, perhaps to collect supplies from some old cache."

The gosthodar repeated himself, as if savoring the aptness of the phrase. "An act of desperation." He paused thoughtfully. "There may be caverns behind the cliffs of the High Falls Gorge, as there were behind the lesser. You must seek them, and destroy any you find."

He straightened, his old voice sounding fuller, less aged. "You will not gather the squadrons from Grasslands and Basin. You will do your searching with what you have here. If your fears reflect fact, and the aliens retain some little potency, to gather the other squadrons here would expose Grasslands and Basin to destructive raids."

The old head swayed again, side to side, side to side, and for a moment the eyes closed entirely. "Go," the old voice said, suddenly raspy again, "and heed what I have said."

The general backed away, arms spread, forelegs bent, belly low, trunk and head lowered in deference. "As you direct, your lordship, that shall I do. And as you enjoin, your lordship, that shall I not do."

The gosthodar was rocking again.

Tech 2 Kroliss had marked his approximate crossing point on Lieutenant Zalkosh's map. Zalkosh, piloting the armed scout, reached High Falls Gorge about two linear miles north of the marked point, at 5,000 feet local reference. He saw no alien craft below, nor did Kroliss, who sat beside him.

If there was an alien craft down there, they would probably have seen it. Nonetheless, Zalkosh began descending on a gravitic vector. The gorge meandered sufficiently that one just might be concealed down there by a rock wall. And at any rate, he wanted to examine the bottom.

Tech 2 Kroliss could imagine serious personal problems if they found no alien craft. It would strongly suggest there'd been one, and that it had escaped. The obvious alternative conclusion would be that he'd hallucinated. So far, the lieutenant hadn't seemed to judge.

Zalkosh paused some twenty feet from the bottom, then started southward along the curving gorge. Both he and Kroliss watched intently for any sign that an alien craft had been there. It was the dry season, and the stream level was low, exposing the larger rocks that had fallen from the walls. If an enemy ship had made a forced landing, it should either still be there, or have left signs of having been there.

It occurred to Kroliss that the alien ship might have been hovering just above the bottom when he'd seen it, and left no trace. Left because he, Kroliss, had flown over. That's what a Board of Investigation would think, and a court-martial.

Zalkosh proceeded for more than a linear mile past the point where Kroliss reported crossing. Then he switched on his transmitter, accessing Security directly.

"Security, this is Lieutenant Zalkosh, reporting on the alien sighting. I have examined more than three linear miles of gorge bottom, centered on Tech 2 Kroliss's reported crossing point, and have seen no sign of an alien craft. I suggest other scouts be sent to search this entire quadrangle, and that the surveillance buoys be instructed to intensify surveillance of this region. Unless otherwise instructed, I will continue south down the gorge to the ocean, or until I find an alien craft.

"Zalkosh out."

Kroliss imagined himself assigned to the death platoon, making amends to the tribe.

Hours had passed when one of the marine lookouts trotted up to the Mei-Li, to report that a small alien craft had snooped the gorge from the north, just above the bottom, and passed out of sight southward. A scout, Menges thought. He felt extremely nervous. Other Wyzhnyny might be flying a search pattern above the plateau, sensors scanning.

He'd heard that the Wyzhnyny didn't take prisoners, and wondered what might happen to him if they did. He decided he'd prefer a pounding from energy bolts. A quick death. Meanwhile he wondered how the hornet hunters were doing. He wasn't about to break radio silence to ask.

While the entomologists and Olavsdottir hunted for hornets' nests, and Captain Stoorvol's men napped, Stoorvol had scanned the known Wyzhnyny radio frequencies. Hearing a lot of traffic but learning nothing, except what Wyzhnyny sounded like on the radio. Finally, after five hours, Olavsdottir collected her sixth colony of hornets. Stoorvol had seen no bogies, and had no idea what the situation was at the big gorge. When everyone and everything was loaded and secured, he took off, the second scooter close behind. He'd wait till he was nearer before radioing Menges and getting the new coordinates. Assuming the Mei-Li was still intact, and Menges alive and free.

Before the additional Wyzhnyny scouts lifted from Seaside Base, their pilots were briefed. Among other things, they were given Tech 2 Kroliss's description of the alien craft: green, and about the size of a corvette. Actually, at eighty-three feet in length, a Wyzhnyny corvette was seriously longer than the forty-six-foot Mei-Li, and proportionately broader. A corvette could hardly be maneuvered into the rainforest.

Stoorvol's two scooters had barely cleared the trees behind them when one of the marines shouted, "Bogies aft!" Both Stoorvol and Haynes accelerated, snapping heads back, then darted down into the pirate gorge, to careen south together below the rim. They were quickly past the burn, then slowing sharply, lifted again to rim level, curved into the rainforest and proceeded eastward among the great trunks and dangling lianas. The whole sequence took perhaps fifteen seconds.

"Captain," said Olavsdottir, "that was exciting!"

"I'm glad you liked it," he answered drily. "Now let's hope they don't find us with their sensors." He switched on his transmitter. "Menges," he said, "this is Stoorvol. What are your coordinates?"

He got no answer. The forest damps transmission at both ends, he told himself. Ten minutes later, in a glade, he lifted above the trees and tried again, using more power. The reply was brief and faint, but readable. He fed Menges' coordinates into his scooter's navcomp, acknowledged Menges' reply, then ducked into the trunk space again and continued eastward.

"I didn't see the bogies," Olavsdottir told him.

"Right. They probably continued east when they lost us. But they'd sure as hell have reported us, which must have stirred things up considerably." And they haven't found the Mei-Li yet. That's the hopeful part.

He pushed as fast as he dared. The sun had been low when they'd left the burn, and once it set, this near the equator, it would get dark quickly. He didn't lift above the trees for a peek around. Didn't see the Wyzhnyny scouts' ground support fighters and APCs posted above the big gorge, waiting for word from the surveillance buoys. He didn't need to. He assumed they'd be there, they and more.

"How's our cargo doing?" he asked.

"All right so far," Olavsdottir answered. "But after a few more hours in those traps, they'll start dying."

Shit! "How much good will they be to us dead?"

"The composition of body fluids will begin to break down, probably including the venom. How much useful information we'd get then is impossible to tell. Some, possibly."

Stoorvol grunted. So we'll push, he thought. He stopped to rearrange personnel and transfer cargo, all the civilians and the hornets going to Haynes' sled. Stoorvol would haul the other four marines, in case a rearguard action was needed, or a fighting decoy, or someone to run interference. "If we run into trouble," he told Haynes, "don't hesitate to ditch the scooter and proceed on foot. Meanwhile load your belt nav from the navcomp right now, and be sure you take it if you ditch. And for godsake don't abandon the hornets!"

The two scooters went on again, side by side now. If they were detected beneath the trees, hopefully they'd read as a single unit. In the trunk space-the forest gallery-the light grew dimmer, more dusky. They were half a mile from the Mei-Li when bolts from a trasher ripped into and through the forest canopy, exploding overhead and on the ground. Broken branches and wood thudded and pattered behind him. Stoorvol shouted as if he had no helmet transmitter. "Set her down and run!" Then he darted upward through a gap in the foliage, evading branches as if by magic. In the air above, his marines poured blaster fire at the nearest Wyzhnyny gunboat, targeting its sensor arrays. Then he dove through another gap, and zigzagged erratically away from the hornet scooter. An APC was firing into the jungle as if tracking him.

He landed skidding, 300 yards short of the Mei-Li's coordinates. "Off," he barked, then triggered the scooter's delayed destruction charge and sprinted sixty yards before it blew. For a few seconds he lay panting, then got to his feet. His commandos were unhurt. After orienting himself in the deep dusk, Stoorvol sent the others on to find the Mei-Li. Alone he paused, squatting by a fallen forest giant overgrown with lichens, moss, and toadstools. The firing had stopped when the scooter had blown. Now it began again, and he sprinted around the root disk to crouch behind the great log. More debris rained down.

Clicking his transmitter, he spoke. "Gunny, do you read me?"

"Loud and clear, sir."

"Boats, do you read me?"

"Loud and clear, sir."

"Good. Gunny, if you've got any men on board, get them off now, ready to fight.

"Boats, Haynes and the civilians should reach you with the hornets soon. On foot. As soon as they're secured, get the Mei-Li out of there, without lights if possible. Gunny's people will help you. Did you both hear that?"

"Loud and clear, sir."

"Loud and clear, sir."

"Good. And Boats, those hornets need to reach the Bering as fast as safely possible; otherwise they may die, and dead they won't be much good. Then we'll have come all this way for nothing. Do not wait for me; I'll be keeping the Wyzhnyny distracted."

It seemed to him he'd already done a pretty good job of that. Otherwise they'd probably have found the Mei-Li and pounded hell out of her.

Meanwhile the trasher fire had stopped again. He suspected what that might mean, and getting to his knees peered over the log toward where the scooter had been. A minute later he saw Wyzhnyny troopers lowering through the canopy in slings.

Crouching, he padded off into the gathering darkness.

With the help of his helmet's active night vision, Stoorvol found his way readily. Even with his belt nav, and knowing his own and the Mei-Li's coordinates to four decimals, it would be easy to miss the boat in the jungle. Abruptly, gunfire sounded from multiple locations overhead: the rapid thumping of trashers, and the sizzling cracks of trasher bolts burning vacuum trails through the air. But without the tearing crashes of detonations in the forest roof, or the dull earthy whumps as they exploded against the ground. This continued for perhaps five long seconds, then cut off. The sound and its cessation told him what the target had been: the Wyzhnyny had been firing at the Mei-Li as she accelerated outward. But there'd been no explosion as of the collection boat blowing up or crashing. Menges had gotten away into warpspace.

Which meant that Haynes and his civilians had run all the way, carrying their hornet traps… Either that or Menges hadn't waited. His fists curled at the thought.

At any rate the situation had changed. He was here until he either died or was picked up by the Mei-Li, when and if she returned for Wyzhnyny prisoners. Stoorvol had ridden from Terra in stasis, and barely knew Weygand. Some commanders might justify leaving the system with what they had-the hornets. But there were others who'd try for the jackpot, especially since it seemed not to endanger the Bering herself. Weygand, it seemed to him, might be one of them.

As for himself, Stoorvol intended to get at least one Wyzhnyny prisoner. Stash him somewhere, properly stunned, safe from rescue or escape. When they'd left Gabrovo Base in the Balkan Autonomy, every one of his commando carried a stunner, a gag, and a fifteen-foot roll of tape in his rucker.

As if on cue, he heard faint voices in the direction he'd come from, and maxxed his sound sensor. Alien speech, and not via radio. It sent a chill through him. How many times, as a boy, he'd daydreamed that!

In a perverse way it also irritated him. Their stealth discipline was lousy! They probably thought their quarry was out of reach in warpspace. They were also moving his way. Spotting a strategically situated liana, he tested it, then climbed thirty feet or so to the crotch of a tree.

Now the Wyzhnyny angled off toward the gorge, perhaps to be picked up and returned to their base. Out of his reach. That would never do. Climbing back down, he trotted after them, blaster ready. Shortly he spotted a Wyzhnyny soldier and shot him in the back, then dropped into a hole left by the uprooting of a mouldering, wind-thrown tree. Blaster pulses hissed, fired blindly into the darkness.

He stayed where he was for several long minutes, blaster ready. Probably they'd sent a squad back to look for him, and they'd missed his hole. Cautiously he raised his head, then screened by the log, crept toward another large tree a few yards away. A liana had rooted to its trunk, and he climbed it, to fit himself into a crotch forty feet up. It wasn't comfortable, but it mostly hid him. Minutes later a squad of Wyzhnyny appeared-the searchers returning from hunting him. He shrunk behind one half of the fork, hoping the concept of an enemy who could climb trees hadn't occurred to them. As they passed, he got the closest look he'd had at one. Centaurs? Not hardly, he told himself. Leave off the necklike torso with its arms, and it looked like an oversized mastiff.

But beyond a doubt, they could run a lot faster than he could.

The warp jump from the gorge back to the Bering had been quick. Menges had reemerged in F-space above the lunar farside not far from the survey ship, then closed in gravdrive. Olavsdottir and her techs had promptly disembarked with their winged captives.

Briefly Sergeant Gabaldon told the skipper what he wanted to do. The skipper never blinked. "Go for it," he said. So Gabaldon claimed the pilot's seat, and with Menges as his copilot, moved away from the Bering, generated warpspace, and headed back for Tagus.

This time he didn't need to grope for the gorge. As sensed from the F-space potentiality, the gravitic coordinate system was blurred, but he had a "sort of" fix on Menges' old hiding place.

His plan, such as it was, was based on two operational premises: (1) The Wyzhnyny were already alerted; and (2) the mission now demanded quickness, not stealth, aggression, not caution. But not stupidity, either.

The immediate challenge promised to be finding a place to pull into the forest. He couldn't expect to find Menges' old hiding place; his fix wasn't that good. But his warrior muse smiled on him: he emerged above the gorge at close to rim level, within recognition distance of the gap between trees that Menges had used before. Jockeying the Mei-Li fully into the forest, he set her down.

His marines were already gathered at the gangway; he keyed it open and they moved out, taking defensive positions nearby. The naval gunners sat tense and ready at their heavy weapons. Gabaldon opened his transmitter and spoke. "Stoorvol, this is Gabaldon. We're parked where Menges hid earlier, but close to the rim. Do you read me? Over."

The message took Paul Stoorvol by surprise. "Gunny," he murmured, "there should be a platoon or so of aliens very near you. Maybe just north, if you're where you say. They seem to be waiting for a ride home, or maybe for orders. They've given up hunting for me. I'd about decided I needed to do something more to keep them around. Right now I'm in a tree, a couple of hundred feet from… from the rim."

He'd stumbled orally because the Wyzhnyny on the ground had opened fire, at either the Mei-Li or the marines. He doubted that anything the Wyzhnyny had on the ground was adequate to breach her hull metal, but if they concentrated on her sensor array… Or if a gunboat was still hanging around…

From his perch he could make out two Wyzhnyny, eerie gold by night vision. He unslung his blaster and shot them both, not to draw attention-the firefight with the marines held that-but to help the odds. Then he climbed down the liana, unslung his blaster again, and clicked his helmet transmitter.

One of the Mei-Li's guns began hammering heavy bolts at the Wyzhnyny, bolts crackling and thudding. Stoorvol realized he could be killed by his own people.

"Gunny," he said, "I'm on the ground now. Their attention is on you. I've killed two more of them, and I'll take out as many more as I can. We need to settle this now. Their command is likely to pour support forces in quickly. Over."

"Received. Received. This is Miller in charge. Gunny's out of touch; left the ship. Miller out."

Out of touch? "Got that. Stoorvol out." Gunny knows what he's doing, Stoorvol told himself, and this was no time for discussions. He found himself a new spot, a large tree with a broadly buttressed base. He wished he had a bag of grenades, instead of just the two on his harness. Taking one off, he charged it, then peered around a buttress and chose his next target-three Wyzhnyny thirty yards away, crouching together behind a fallen tree. He threw the grenade to land just behind the one in the middle, then ducked behind the buttress again, heard the explosion and peered out. All three seemed dead.

The firefight ahead of him went on as if he weren't there, so he darted forward in a low crouch to where his latest victims lay. There he raised up enough to peer over the log. Ahead as well as to the sides, he could see numerous Wyzhnyny kneeling behind trees and the occasional fallen trunk. And he could see casualties. The marines weren't laying down much fire now though, as if there weren't many of them left. The thought flashed: How many? Four? Five? But the Mei-Li's starboard gunner, in his armored bubble, was still pumping out the heavy stuff.

With bursts of rotten wood, bolts blew through the log within ten feet of Stoorvol. To his right, a Wyzhnyny he'd thought was dead, stood as if to flee, then stopped as if in freeze-frame, staring at the marine officer. Stoorvol shot him down, then turning, began to shoot at every Wyzhnyny he could see.

It seemed the final straw. All along the Wyzhnyny line, aliens rose to flee. Stoorvol crouched low again, and from his thigh pocket drew his stunner. To his left, a Wyzhnyny cleared the log in a bound, so easily and gracefully it startled the marine. As it landed, Stoorvol thumbed the trigger. The Wyzhnyny stumbled, pitched forward and lay still. Another followed, and it too fell.

The starboard gun hammered a dozen more trasher bolts after the fleeing Wyzhnyny before it stopped. Then, heart in his mouth, Stoorvol stood and jumped onto the log, waving both arms overhead. The Mei-Li's gangway slid open, its ramp extruding. Three marines rode out on an AG freight sled, followed closely by two crewmen riding another.

"Over here!" Stoorvol shouted, again as if he didn't have a radio. "I've got two prisoners stunned." The marines veered to the north as if they hadn't heard. It was the crewmen who responded to Stoorvol, quickly setting down where he indicated. He helped them load an unconscious Wyzhnyny on the sled. "Your gunner did good work with that heavy weapon," he said. "He broke them with it."

"Wasn't that," the older crewman grunted, lifting the second Wyzhnyny's hindquarters.

"What, then?" It seemed to Stoorvol the man was going to give him the credit, for taking them from behind.

"Wyzhnyny aircraft are on their way, sir. They'll be laying heavy fire in here." They finished getting the second Wyzhnyny aboard, and as if that was a signal, an alarm horn blared from the Mei-Li.

"Come aboard, Captain," said the older. "That's Mr. Menges' twenty-tick warning."

Menges? Where was Gabaldon? And the marines with the other sled? He realized then; it was casualties, not prisoners they were collecting. Instead of getting on the sled, Stoorvol started toward the marines, but the senior crewman drew his stunner and thumbed the trigger. Quickly the two crewmen dumped the inert marine officer onto the sled with the prisoners, then sped to the gangway and inside the Mei-Li.

The marines, on the other hand, hadn't even looked toward the ship when the gangway slid shut. The senior crewman activated the sled's restraint field, felt it snug around him. "Jesus, Buddha, and Rama!" said the younger. "What's the matter with those marines? They should've come!"

Another alarm clamored through the boat, warning of imminent takeoff.

"They wouldn't leave their buds behind," the elder said.

"They were probably all dead!"

"Apparently it doesn't make any difference to them."

They felt the Mei-Li lift, pull backward from the forest edge, then swing about. At once it took flight, for five seconds of acceleration before warpspace generated. After a long moment's stillness, the senior crewman released the restraint field. Two others appeared, and helped transfer the inert prisoners onto AG litters, to be taken to a holding cell.

When the two Wyzhnyny had been taken away, the younger crewman gestured toward the unconscious Stoorvol, still lying on the sled. "He was going to help them, wasn't he?"

"Yep. Who knows? Maybe those hyenas eat enemy casualties."

He said it absently. His mind was on the Mei-Li's last remaining scooter, with Gunnery Sergeant Gabaldon piloting. It had left shortly after the Mei-Li landed. The crewman had heard enough to know the strategy: the sergeant would drop into the depths of the gorge, speed north a couple of miles, then climb a couple, to watch for Wyzhnyny aerial reinforcements. Finally he'd seen some coming: gunboats and APCs. A lot of them.