The Escape Orbit

Chapter 18

After having had the fires under observation, during darkness, when they would have been seen to the best advantage and having drawn certain conclusions from these observations, it was expected that the Bugs would send down a probe for a closer look. Instead of a quick dive in and out of the atmosphere, which was the usual procedure when investigating any suspicious occurrences it was expected that curiosity would make them soft-land the probe for a really close look. And it was known that if the vehicle landed it would not have enough fuel left to return to the guardship. Being an extremely valuable piece of equipment, the Bugs would not soft-land it in the first place unless they expected to get it back. The only way they could do that was to bring it back aboard the shuttle, and if they considered landing the shuttle they could not be feeling too suspicious.

The probe arrived about two hours before noon. On the way down it had a perfect view of cats hurrying out of the bay, many of them were towing rafts; of the refugees on wagons and afoot, well advanced along all the roads leading from the town; of the town itself, devastated and still burning in many places; its gutted corpse hidden by a filthy shroud of smoke. It could see the acres of smoldering tree stumps and vegetation, and the highly unnatural outlines of the destruction which proved that a weapon designed for use over a range of thousands of miles of vacuum was capable of wreaking considerable havoc despite the blanketing effects of atmosphere.

It noted the ship crash-landed and toppled onto its side, observing and relaying back the fine details of the buckled stabilizer which must have given on landing, the partly opened airlock and sprung plating which steamed faintly with escaping chlorine, and the slit in the nose where the C-7 blaster hadn’t closed properly. And there were the smoking remains of the farmhouse close by, whose occupants were no doubt the indirect cause of the surrounding devastation, which had been set on fire by its tail-flare.

So far the data was utterly corroborative material for the telescopic observers in the guardship. But suddenly the probe opened out like a flower with super-sensitive vision, sound and analysis equipment, in effect subjecting the area to a microscopic as well as a telescopic examination.

Such an examination could not be allowed to continue.

A lone figure came staggering out of a patch of unburned vegetation some fifty yards from the probe. His body was terribly burned and bleeding from wounds inflicted by sharp branches, even his leather harness was charred and cracked by the heat, and from his mouth there came a steady, high pitched moaning that was a continuous low scream. He carried a club in the shape of a heavy table leg, and when he saw the landed probe he screamed harshly and came stumbling towards it.

In actual fact Briggs was suffering no discomfort at all. His ghastly appearance was due solely to imaginative makeup, his club was a very carefully fashioned table leg weighted and balanced to inflict the maximum damage and he had landed one of the easiest jobs in the whole operation simply through his acting ability. He was supposed to disable the probe so that the Bugs would be thrown back onto the resources of the telescopes on the ship and their own unaided eyesight when they landed later—if they landed later. So dutifully, almost gleefully, Briggs set about battering the probe into scrap, hamming the part of a poor, pain-crazed prisoner for all he was worth.

But he must have been a little too enthusiastic in his use of the club. The battering must have opened a path between the Probe’s fuel tank and the still red-hot venturis. There could only have been a few ounces of fuel remaining in the tank, but it was enough. There was a sudden flare, a concussion which made the whole dummy jerk around him, and when he reached the periscope Warren could see that there was very little left of Briggs or the probe.

Warren settled back for another period of waiting, and thinking.

Vitally important, but safe, was how Warren had described the assignment to Briggs. The probe should be given just enough time to report on the desolation around the site, the absence of any possibly dangerous groups of prisoners, of harmful activity, of anything except burning, smoldering vegetation and a ship which had crash-landed and was leaking chlorine. Then it would have to be disabled so that the small sounds made by the hidden assault groups would not be picked up. It was not expected that the Bugs would booby-trap the probe, since it would be much simpler to drop a bomb on the area if their suspicions were aroused. Briggs had agreed that all this was so, and his expression had reminded Warren of the time when this same Briggs had shown him how to swing a hammock where the Battlers couldn’t reach it and Warren had nearly hung himself on the safety rope—the expression of a man trying hard not to laugh…

The time dragged past and the sun beat down on the site and on the metal dummy. Inside the dummy the heat was unbearable and inside the suits it was even worse. Kelso, Sloan and himself were now lying prone with a suit technician attending each of them. The technicians had removed the gauntlet sections of the battledress and placed their hands in small pans of water, indicating that they should lift them in and out at intervals. He also kept wetting down the accessible portions of their fishbowls. Evaporation from their hands and helmets was supposed to cool them and avoid heatstroke, but Warren was convinced that the water treatment’s effect was chiefly psychological.

Above them, invisible in the sunshine, the Bugs should have made their decision—the only decision possible to them if they had any decent feelings at all. The accidental destruction of their probe should not have aroused suspicion, considering the circumstances, and the shuttle should already be on the way down to rescue the survivors of the crash-landed ship—some of whom must be alive to judge by the devastation surrounding it! But something might have made them suspicious, or perhaps they were too cowardly to send a rescue party, and a missile was on the way down instead to ensure that one of their ships did not fall into the hands of the prisoners…

Suddenly the suit technician waved and pointed upwards, but it was not until Warren reached the periscope that the sound of the shuttle coming down got through his helmet. He didn’t see the landing because of the smoke and ash being blown through the gap in the plating where the periscope was set up, but he could tell that it was very close and the elation he felt was due only in part to the beautiful way things were working out. A contributory factor was his knowledge that, not soon but in the foreseeable future, he would be able to get out of the pressure cooker he was using for a spacesuit…!

The clouds of smoke from the many small fires started by the landing served to hide the movements of the ground assault men, from the eyes on the ship as well as those in space, as they took up their positions in the unburned cover around the edge of the Escape site. Some small trees fell, stirring up more smoke. In actual fact they were being pushed over and damp grass and twigs at hand for the purpose were being used to produce the smoke—the idea being to accustom the Bug rescuers to falling trees and sudden, dense clouds of smoke. They might be frightened by these effects, but the whole area was smoldering and constantly being reignited by sudden puffs of wind—so that they should not be suspicious of them. And when the smoke was allowed to clear temporarily the shuttle could be seen standing about one hundred yards from the dummy with the burned farmhouse almost directly between them.

It wasn’t an ideal position for the ambush, Warren thought, but it could have been much worse.

With gestures which were an improbable combination of salute, cheery wave and thumbs up sign, Kelso and Sloan disappeared into the mouth of the tunnel heading for Number Two Attack Point, which was very nearly to windward of the shuttle’s position and from which the main body of commandos would be able to approach the ship under cover of smoke. At Warren’s signal the suit technician stopped pouring water over him and began pounding on the interior of the metal hull with a piece of wood. It was a slow, irregular beat, not very loud but still capable of being heard all over the Escape site, and it was the sort of noise which might very well be made by someone trying to attract attention when radio or other means of communication were impossible. That would be how the Bugs in the shuttle would regard it, Warren told himself. And later, if the pounding should vary in beat or volume they should regard it as a sign of impatience or desperation on the part of the survivors and not as instructions going out to the assault group via drum-talk…

The shuttle’s lock swung suddenly open and the ladder with its oddly shaped rungs and stubby handrail came telescoping down. A billow of smoke from the fires behind Number Two rolled past the enemy ship and when it cleared there were two Bugs on the ladder. A few seconds later there were four, all descending as quickly as was possible for that particular life-form to move. Excitement as well as heat made Warren’s mouth go dry.

They intended to make a fast rescue. That much was plain from the speed of their descent and the fact that the cargo lock remained sealed—they weren’t going to break out one of their ground vehicles. And the normal crew of the shuttle was five. Counting the one they must have left on radio watch there were five beings in the rescue party, which was a further indication that they suspected nothing or they would not have taken so many at one time. But the four Bugs moving away from the base of the landing ladder were armed—they might not be suspicious but at the same time neither were they stupid. In addition they carried metal-cutting equipment and packs which probably contained medication of some kind, all hung from the lightweight type of suit which gave the maximum amount of physical mobility with, as was usual with such suits, the minimum of physical protection. All at once Warren felt sorry for them.

From the Bug point of view this was simply an errand of mercy, but one which required a considerable amount of intestinal fortitude to carry out. To eyes accustomed to much higher light intensities the Escape site must appear a very spooky place. Even though the sun shone through an obscuring cloud of smoke, the light was not good. All around them the ground smoldered, rendering objects and distances uncertain in what must appear to be a hot and foggy twilight, and when a large cloud of smoke drifted past their visibility would drop to a few yards. People who would subject themselves to such conditions, even for a few minutes, possessed qualities which Warren could admire. It was a pity that these admirable qualities would serve only to get their possessors killed a few minutes from now.

Warren signaled again and the technician gave the hull a single, solid blow which made the interior of the dummy ring like a discordant gong. In the distance there was a crash of falling trees and the soft crackling of fires, both too far away to seriously frighten the Bugs. Behind Warren the smoke aimed at screening the site from the guardship’s telescopes, which at that time were thirty-two degrees above the horizon with a thickening atmospheric haze to penetrate in addition to the smoke pall, was rising like a thick, blue fog. At the same time the men at Number Two were busily making smoke which rolled slowly towards the shuttle, billowing upwards as it came to drift past the control-room ports high in the ship’s nose. At ground level this smoke appeared to be clotted here and there, but even to Warren’s more sensitive human vision the wavering, indistinct shadows did not at all resemble a slow-walking file of men.

One to get ready … he thought.

As a species the Bugs were six-limbed and insectlike, but lacking in the protective carapace of exoskeleton developed by the many Earth insects—they were the type of bug which squished rather than cracked when it was walked on. Their bodies seemed altogether too soft and heavy for their four walking legs, mainly because of the high liquid content of their systems and the fact that the movement of each vital organ or muscle was reflected as a constant twitching and bubbling of their semi-transparent tegument. But they were in no sense physical weaklings. Their two manipulators which projected forwards from each side of the head section, which in turn was connected to the main body by a short and ridiculously thin neck, were both sensitive and immensely strong. The manipulators, mouth and general sensory equipment housed in the head section had the hairy, frondlike appearance of something which might have grown under the sea. Not all of these physical details were visible as the four Bugs rounded the farmhouse, but because they were wearing the equivalent of the tight-fitting service battledress there was very little hidden.

Two to get set…

The second gonglike note made them hesitate, as did the realistic collapse of one wall of the farmhouse with the accompanying dense smoke. But they came on, their bodies wobbling like water-filled balloons in their haste, their head sections swaying heavily from side to side. Behind the dummy the smoke was rising so high and becoming so thick that the whole Escape site was darkened. The Bugs were now hidden from sight of the shuttle by the ruined farmhouse. They came to a halt before the dummy’s airlock, and one of them suddenly began to move away again, obviously intending to have a look at the other side of the mock-up. Warren made frantic chopping motions with his hand.

… And three to GO!

The reverberations of the final signal and the subsidence of more wreckage from the farmhouse both served to keep Warren from hearing the twang of cross-bows from the farmhouse, from points all around the site and from positions further along the interior of the dummy. It seemed suddenly as if the four Bugs had grown bristles—thick and very short bristles, because the bolts had penetrated deeply. They rolled over soggily and lay still, leaking the yellow stuff they used for blood and which turned black within a few seconds of being exposed to the oxygen-laden air.

Warren swung away from the periscope and hurried carefully toward the airlock, thinking that if the four Bugs had made any noise as they died, which was very unlikely, the one left aboard the shuttle might put it down to a cry of surprise at the sudden cave-in of wreckage, some of which might have fallen too close for comfort.

The Bug in the ship could not suspect anything yet, but it would require only a few minutes of not being able to raise its friends on their suit radios for it to become very anxious indeed. What happened after that depended on how well the Bug could see, how easily it became confused and, most important of all, how any fine and admirable qualities it possessed.

The dummy’s airlock dropped open and Warren went through it, running.