Battlefield Earth (63 page)

     True it was that the stockpiles of breathe-gas and ammunition had been stripped to the last cartridge. The grass and shrub had been crushed dead for years. A quarter of an acre had been the extent of the breath-gas dump; half an acre the extent of the fuel and ammunition dump. And it was all gone.

Angus opened the lock of the compound’s main door, and the reserve troops from the attack carrier went sprinting in, covering each other.

The place was empty. It had four levels of offices, shops, and hangars. Pumps were running. Lights were all on. And it was a jumble of hasty departure.

Jonnie stood in the corridor outside the recreation area. What a dismal, dank place; mold was growing on things. Water was dripping down the walls, only kept cleared out by the pumps. What an awful place to try to live, even for a Psychlo.

He thumbed through sheaves of radio dispatch forms that had been spouting out of a printer. Even the paper was wet in this hot, humid place. They had been monitoring all bands, particularly the pilot band. It was odd to see: “Andy, can you pick up that load of pilgrims in Calcutta?” and “Please bring me another flying suit and some fuel, MacCallister.” The Scot pilots largely talked Psychlo with a jumble of English. It must have looked quite mad to the company employees, huddled here in this remote jungle, not knowing what was really going on but monitoring every scrap of it.

A Russian raced up to him holding a Psychlo breathe-mask he must have found someplace. It still had the bottle attached and was operating. Jonnie sniffed it and it burnt his nose passages. Let’s see, it took about twelve hours for one of the flasks to run out. This was still…half-full? quarter-full? He shook it to see how much of the breathe-gas in liquefied form was still there. The Psychlos had left within the last eight or nine hours.

He hobbled along the corridor, sweat streaming off him. The pumps were

running air into the place but it didn’t make it any cooler. The usual Psychlo stink…no, worse, for it was mixed up with mold. Bubbles of sound floating in from various parts of the interior levels where his people were still searching. There was a mine phone off its buttons and he listened at it. Still alive. He could even hear the mine pumps running at the distant tungsten workings.

This minesite wasn’t as old as most.

Probably been moved here from elsewhere in the forest when they found another tungsten deposit. They were mad for tungsten. The viewscreens in the mine manager’s office were on. Jonnie looked at the big electric roasting ovens at the mine. They conveyed and roasted ore there. Steam was coming off coils. They must have considered this upset on the planet temporary for they’d gone on mining.

He went down the stairs that led to the hangar. The usual Psychlo steps, twice the height of human steps, hard to negotiate with this leg. Well, he was getting better. He’d sure been able to use a blast rifle today. No speed in his arm. But it was improving.

The hangar was in the same disarray as the other parts of the interior. It still held vehicles.

Angus was poking around in the vast, overlit interior. He had a big crayon in his hand and was putting an “X” on vehicles he felt couldn’t be readily made operational. Two small tanks. Angus had “X’d” them out. Several flying mine platforms. No “Xs,” so okay. Several flatbeds, only half of them usable.

A Psychlo sign: “Ordnance” on a door. Jonnie went in. Blast mortars! Even a pile of shells for them, contrary to interior-storage-of-ammunition regulations. Well!

He came out and grabbed Angus. “Get two of those big flatbed trucks, get a flying mine platform on each of them. Put a mortar and ammunition on each of the flying platforms. Pile those tarps in wads on the front of the flatbeds for armor. Put one of the rigs outside, put the other one just inside the door of the hangar.” Yes, there was fuel.

He told Sir Robert to get him four men and a driver for each of the rigs. And to dispatch one of the rigs as soon as made up to tail the convoy.

“That rig?” said Sir Robert.

“They can fly the mine platform off the truck and lay a mortar barrage down. They can block the road by blasting trees across it. Get the convoy tailed, not too close, and if they turn back, block their way.”

“And if it doesn’t work and they get chased back here?” said Sir Robert.

“The other rig inside the hangar door can be taken out to help defend the place. Put another four men and a driver with it. I’ll be taking it when we return here from a visit to the Brigantes.”

“You’ll be chasing the convoy too!” said Sir Robert, adding with sarcasm: “Ranked among the best-planned and most carefully drilled operations of history, this one is undoubtedly the very finest!” He went off to get it handled, muttering about a flatbed handling tanks.

A Scot came racing up. “Jonnie sir, I think you’d better come down to the third level.” He looked ashen.

Jonnie limped with difficulty down the next stairway. He was not at all prepared for what they had found.

It was a big room they apparently used for shooting practice, a sort of indoor range. Some Russians were standing around something on the floor, looking at it with varied expressions of distaste and disapproval. The Scot directing him stopped, mutely pointing down.

In the middle of a veritable lake of congealed blood lay what must have been two old women. It was hard to tell from the scraps. But strands of gray hair, brown skin, and ripped clothing lay, with scattered bone chips in two mounds. The mangled messes and some spent blast gun cases told their story.

Several Psychlos had stood here and bit by bit, inch by inch, with hundreds of carefully non lethal shots, had carved two women apart.

What a hellish bedlam of shots and screams and laughter this place must have been just a few hours ago!

Dr. MacKendrick, summoned by someone else, came in. He stopped, avoiding standing in the blood. “Impossible to tell from temperature. Not enough left to check. Maybe four hours from the coagulation. Women…forty, fifty years old…worn out by hard work…. They carved their limbs off inch by inch and shot by shot!” He stood up and confronted Jonnie. “Why do Psychlos do that?”

“It gives them pleasure. They think it’s delicious. The pain and agony.”

Jonnie looked at MacKendrick. “It’s about the only time they feel joy.”

The doctor’s face set. “I feel much better about autopsies on Psychlos!”

A Russian had been moving something with a stick he had found.

“Hold it,” said Jonnie. He stepped around the blood pool and picked the object up.

Robert the Fox had come in. He halted in shock.

The object that was being held up was a tam-o’-shanter, the bonnet of a Scot!

No body of a Scot. Just a tam-o’-shanter, fairly new. The kind the Coordinators wore.

     Jonnie stood in the drenching rain and looked at the platform of the ancient, wrecked flatbed.

Here within the last two or three days or perhaps only hours ago stood three bound human beings: two old Brigante women and one young Scot, waiting for the Psychlos to come out and seize them, helpless to move or escape, probably covered from behind by poison arrows and grenades. How many Bantu and Pygmies had stood in this place the same way, captured and sold by the Brigantes?

And the Psychlos had come and taken them, bought them from the one-time mercenaries with the articles now lying there. The two old women had died in agony. The fate of the Scot was unknown.

A Russian lance had gingerly tested the flatbed and barter goods for booby traps. If Jonnie knew Psychlos, and if they felt this trade ended future relations, it would have been rigged to explode. It wasn’t. The Psychlo employees must think that when they retook the planet they’d be back.

Jonnie examined the goods. Sealed metal containers: a hundred pounds of sulfur, another hundred of niter. Under the tarpaulin lay a big coil of mine fuse. Articles that could be used, adding only charcoal, to make grenades. In a smaller wrapped pack: mine radio power cartridges. Such was the price of three human beings.

Jonnie turned his back on it and walked to where a Russian officer and men were holding the captured Brigantes. There were seventeen of them left alive. They sat with their hands gripped back of their heads, looking down at the ground, very still under the ring of assault rifle muzzles. Seven wounded Brigantes lay about, groaning and moving in the thick humus. Twelve dead Brigantes had been hauled in and lay in a heap.

One of the seventeen sensed a new presence and looked up. He was a barrel-chested brute: teeth broken long ago, face scarred and pitted, a huge jaw, short-cut hair. He was dressed in monkey skins cut in a military pattern. Two bandoliers slotted with poisoned arrows crossed his chest. His eyes looked like scummed pools.

“Why did you fire on us?” he demanded. It came out as “W’y ja fur awn oos?” English if you could unscramble it.

“I think,” said Jonnie, “it was the other way around. What were you doing here?”

“By conventions and articles of war you can only get my name-rank-and-serial-number.” Mush, but understandable.

“All right,” said Jonnie, leaning on his cane. “What is that you said?”

“Arf Moiphy, captunk, fit’commando, occpaychun fierces, Yarmy of Hauter Zairey. Are you the relief fierce or united-nationsh?”

Jonnie turned to David Fawkes, the Coordinator, with a raised eyebrow.

“They have a myth, a legend, that someday the international bank will send a relief force. I think the United Nations was some political organization that looked after small countries and interfered when they were attacked. It ’s remarkable that they could keep a myth going that long….”

“Where is your main body?” said Jonnie.

“Doan hefta answer nuppin bot name rank-and-serial-number,” said the Brigante captain.

“Well, now,” said Jonnie, “if we were this relief force we’d have to know, wouldn’t we?” “If yur purt of the relief fierce yu’d know where was,” challenged the Brigante. “The relief fierce is alroddy dere, or gung be dere any day.”

“I think we had better talk to your commander,” said Jonnie.

“General Snith? He’s inna main basecamp. Too far.”

Jonnie shrugged and waved a hand at the Russian officer as though to go ahead. The Russians nosed up their assault rifles.

“Tup day’s march ober dere!” said the Brigante captain, trying to point with tied hands and then making do frantically with his chin.

“How long ago did you put the captives over on that platform?” asked Jonnie.

“Pla’furm?” said the Brigante playing it dumb.

Jonnie turned to the Russian officer again.

“Yes’day afnoon!” said the Brigante swiftly.

The fate of the Scot was important, if he were alive. Jonnie cast around as to what he could do. He had a makeshift tail on the convoy. He had an ambush in front of it. There was no flanking in these woods: indeed, a ground car (much less a truck) would almost run into itself trying to get around these trees, or even be able to make headway over this soaking wet humus. No wonder the Psychlos had their own arrangements with the Brigantes. He decided he’d have to wait for the battle.

He told the Russian Coordinator the orders for the Russian officer. In a very gingerly, alert fashion they began to strip the Brigantes, going over their monkey skin uniforms for knives and concealed weapons, which abounded.

They were in the process of tying the descendants of the long-ago mercenaries when Captunk Arf Moiphy pleaded, “You min ufl attembt to my wounded?”

Jonnie let him go ahead. Moiphy jumped up, grabbed a heavy club, and pounced on the seven wounded before he could be stopped. With expert swings that landed crushing thuds on their skulls, he killed them.

Smiling and gratified he threw down the club and turned to a Russian so his hands could be retied.

“Thanunk you,” he said.

- Part XVIII -

     Bittie MacLeod, carrying a blast rifle as tall as himself, followed along behind Sir Jonnie into the main Brigante encampment.

Sir Jonnie had sent him back twice, but wasn’t the proper place of a squire to follow his knight with his weapons into a place of danger?

And Bittie admitted to himself that it did look dangerous! There must be twenty-five hundred or three thousand of these people scattered around this clearing deep in the forest.

They had landed at the top edge of the open space. The prisoners- ooh, how they had stunk up the ship!- had been held in a lump in the big marine attack plane, well separated from their weapons, and when they landed, the prisoners had been put on the ground first. Then Sir Robert had looked over the place and made some defense dispositions to cover their possible retreat as was proper for a War Chief.

Bittie had taken the opportunity of persuading Sir Jonnie into some dry clothes- all you had to do was touch him and the water splashed. The Russians had not been idle over at the dam, and seeing all this rain, they had cut up some camouflage cloth and made rain capes.

It had been hard to get Sir Jonnie to pay attention and take care of himself, to get some food down and change clothes. But Bittie had done it. He’d clasped up the rain cape with a badge with a red star on it and gotten Jonnie’s dry shirt belted with his gold buckled belt and had found a helmet liner with a white star on it to keep the rain off him, and all in all, under these circumstances, Sir Jonnie looked pretty presentable even in this rain.

Sheets of water were marching across the wide clearing full of people. Somebody had cut down an awful lot of trees and burned them sometime past. The blackened stumps stood all about. A crop was half-grown but these people were running all about trampling it, a thing you shouldn’t do to crops.

Bittie looked about him through the rain. These creatures did not fit into his sense of fitness of things. He had read quite a bit in his school- he liked the very old romances best- and he hadn’t ever encountered anything like this!

There were no old men or old women. There were quite a few children in various bad, unhealthy conditions-potbellies, scabs on them, dirty. Shocking! Didn’t anyone properly feed them or clean them up?

Men they passed gave them a funny salute with a raised finger. Ugly, contemptuous faces. Faces of all colors and mixed colors. And all dirty. Their clothing was a kind of joke of a uniform, and not worn with any style, just sloppy.

They seemed to speak some strange kind of English like they had oatmeal in their mouths. He knew he didn’t talk really good English, not like university men such as Sir Robert, nor as good as Sir Jonnie. But anybody could understand him when he talked and he was trying to improve so that Colonel Ivan’s English, which he helped him with, would be good. But these people didn’t seem to care if the words even got out of their stinky mouths. Bittie almost bumped into Sir Jonnie, who had stopped in front of a middle-aged man. What language was Sir Jonnie using? Ah, Psychlo! Jonnie was asking something and the Brigante nodded and pointed over to the west and said something back in Psychlo. Bittie got it. Sir Jonnie didn’t want to know anything, he just wanted to see whether the Brigante spoke Psychlo. Clever!

Where were they headed? Oh, toward that big lean-to that had a leopard-skin-sort-offlag on a pole in front of it. Bittie saw they had been following the prisoners who were still under guard, probably being taken to their chief.

This was a pretty awful kind of people. They simply halted wherever they were, right in the path, and relieved themselves. Awful. Over there a young man had thrown a girl down and they were…yes, they were! Fornicating right out in public.

Bittie turned his head away and tried to purify his thoughts. But the direction he turned showed him a man making a child do something unspeakable.

He began to feel a little ill and walked much closer to Sir Jonnie’s heels. These creatures were worse than animals. Far worse.

Bittie followed Sir Jonnie into the lean-to. How the place stank! There was somebody sitting on a tree trunk they had built the lean-to over. The man was awfully fat and was yellowish with the yellow that Dr. MacKendrick said was malaria. The folds of the man’s body made deep seams of dirt.

He had a funny cap on that must be made out of leather; it had a peak in front; there was something set on it-a woman’s brooch? some kind of stone- a diamond?

The creature they had captured, Arf, was standing in front of the fat man. With a fist beat on his chest, Arf was making a report. What was he calling the fat man? General Snith? Wasn’t “Snit” a Psychlo common name? Wasn’t “Smith” the common English name? Terrible hard to tell with that oatmeal accent. The general was chewing on a haunch of something and didn’t seem much impressed.

Finally the general spoke: “Didjer gitcher serplies? The sulphur?”

“Well, no,” Arf said and tried to tell it all again.

“Didjer bring bock yer stiffs?” the general said. Stiffs? Stiffs? Oh, bodies!

This “captunk” Arf seemed to get a bit scared and back up.

The general hurled the haunch straight at him and hit him in the face with it! “Howjer oxpect ter eat, den!” screamed the general. Eat? Stiffs? Bodies? Eat? Their own dead?

Then Bittie looked down at the thrown “haunch” that had ricocheted toward him. It was a human arm!

Hurriedly Bittie got out of there and got back of the lean-to and was very sick at his stomach.

But Sir Jonnie found him in a moment and put an arm around his shoulders and wiped his mouth with a bandana. He tried to get a Russian to take Bittie back to the plane but Bittie wouldn’t go. The place of a squire was with his knight, and Jonnie might need this blast rifle among these horrible creatures. So they let him continue to follow.

Sir Jonnie looked into the lean-to in the edge of the trees and seemed very interested, and Bittie looked and saw a very old, very battered instruction machine like the pilots used to learn Psychlo, and this seemed to mean something to Sir Jonnie.

Who were they looking for now? The rain was coming down and these people were racing around and the blast rifle was very heavy and getting heavier. Oh, the Coordinators!

They found them in another lean-to, a pair of young Scots…wasn’t one of them a MacCandless from Inverness? Yes, he thought he recognized him. They sat there, soaking wet even under cover, their bonnets like mops. They looked pretty white of face.

Sir Jonnie was trying to find out how they got here and they were pointing to a pile of cable- dropped by a plane.

So Sir Jonnie told them they’d better leave with them and they were saying no, it was a Council order to bring these people back to the compound in America, and even though the transports were overdue they had supposed it was trouble for the Council to be finding enough pilots for the lift.

After a lot of argument about their duty- on their side- and their safety- on Sir Jonnie’s side, they were persuaded to at least come to the plane where they could be given a food package and maybe some weapons. So they all pushed their way through this mob of people back to where the Russians held a defense perimeter and got into the plane.

Sir Robert was there. He sat the two Scot Coordinators down in one of the big Psychlo bucket seats.

“Was there a third one of you?” Sir Robert wanted to know.

“Well, yes,” said MacCandless. “There was Allison. But a couple of days ago he fell in a river and some scaly beast got him.”

“Did you see this?” said Sir Robert.

Well, no, they hadn’t seen it. The general had told them and there were plenty of rivers and lots of scaly beasts.

Sir Jonnie was saying something now: “Did Allison talk Psychlo?”

“He was in pilot training,” said MacCandless. “The Federation needs its own pilots sometimes. I suppose he did.”

“Yes, he did,” said the other Scot. “He could talk some Psychlo. They pulled him out of the class to come here. The order to lift these people out came very suddenly from the Council and we were short-’

Sir Robert said, “Do you recall hearing him talk Psychlo to these ruffians around here?”

They thought for a while. The rain was drumming on the marine attack plane roof and it was awfully hot.

“Aye,” said MacCandless finally. “I heard him talking to one of the officers that was finding it remarkable he talked Psychlo. They chattered away in it quite a while. I don’t speak-’

“That’s all we wanted to know,” Sir Robert was saying. He looked up at Sir Jonnie meaningfully. “Interrogation! They wanted him for interrogation!”

And Sir Jonnie was nodding.

Then Sir Robert pulled out something Bittie didn’t know he had. A tam-o’-shanter with blood on it. He handed it to the two Coordinators.

They found some thread initials in it. Yes, it was Allison’s. Where’d Sir Robert get it?

Sir Robert blasted them very proper. He told them, and Bittie was shocked to learn that the Brigantes had sold Allison to the Psychlos! And the

Psychlos must have wanted him for interrogation and god help Allison now. Sold Allison? A human being? To the monsters? Neither Bittie nor the Coordinators could get their wits around that.

There was a dreadful row then. Sir Robert ordered the two Coordinators to come along with them. The Coordinators said this was their duty: to lift these people out; it was a Council order! And Sir Robert thundered at them that he was the War Chief of Scotland and he damned well wasn’t going to leave them here. The two Coordinators tried to leave and Sir Jonnie and Sir Robert, using the cargo lashings Bittie hastily found, simply tied them up. They put them on top of the supplies at the rear of the plane.

They withdrew their defense perimeter and took off, and Bittie was not surprised to hear one of the pilots ask permission to strafe these creatures from the air. Sir Robert said no, if they tried that the creatures would just run under the trees; they weren’t equipped to handle them right now and they had other things to do; but if they’d done what they appeared to have done, they’d have a bloody feud on their filthy hands. Everybody was pretty upset about Allison.

When they had taken off and were flying back to the compound, Bittie got to pondering those people down there.

He leaned over to Sir Jonnie and said, “Sir Jonnie, how in all this rain can they be so dirty”