Bill 7 - the Galactic Hero (8 page)

“But my target computer gave me 1000 points for it, just like an ammo dump!”

“Then it must have been something else, like an ammo dump.” The general gave a small cheer as something blew up on the screen before him. “What made you think it was an air-raid shelter?”

Bill thought hard for a second. “There was a big sign on it that said 'Air-Raid Shelter.'”

General Weissearse laughed the hearty laugh he had learned at the Imperial Military Heroes Academy. “That's just enemy propaganda, son. Pay it no mind.” He looked intently at the screen for a moment. “Now you'd better do something about that fighter closing in on us, or we'll both be in heaven tonight.”

The long hours catheterized in the chair paid off. Bill sliced up the fighter and touched his laser to the heads of a small flight of incoming missiles.

The morning dragged on. Even the adrenaline rush of combat can get routine if there is never a break to recover, and the action continued without a pause. When he was not under attack, Bill had more ground targets than he could possibly hit. And he was under attack most of the time.

It was tense. It was exhausting. It was mind-boggling. But it wasn't interesting.

It only became interesting a little after lunchtime.

Bill had gotten adept at picking off single incoming planes or Missiles. Two at a time was no longer a challenge. Three at a time was enough to require some concentration. Four at a time was beginning to get difficult. Above five, and he needed help from the nose gunner on the ship behind the Heavenly Peace. At this precise moment, there were five manned fighters and six missiles highlighted in red on Bill's screen.

Bill fired a heat-seeking missile into the pack and hoped for the best. A smart missile caught a fighter, just as the heat-seeker took a missile. Bill switched to the lasers. He swept them through the incoming pack and blew up three more, plus one of his own escort fighters. The gunner on the ship behind got two fighters before he developed more pressing concerns of his own.

Another heat-seeking missile blew up another fighter. Bill fired yet another before he knew what the first had done. Then he switched back to the lasers and touched off a missile before it could reach him. The last heat-seeking missile caught the last fighter.

Nailing ten incoming targets at once was pretty good. Bill knew it was a personal best, and thought it might be a record of some sort.

Unfortunately, it wasn't quite good enough. Bill had intercepted ten, but there had been eleven, and that last missile found one of the small and vulnerable spots on the Heavenly Peace.

There was a great explosion and the ship went into a steep dive. Alarms went off, even more of them and louder than reveille. The safety harness and the catheter tightened up, cutting off Bill's breathing and nearly cutting off small but important pieces of his body. His video display went solid red. Electric blue letters flashed, PREPARE TO DIE! PREPARE TO DIE! PREPARE TO DIE! WE'RE GOING DOWN! PREPARE TO DIE!

A small window — the one that Bill had started to think of as the general's private window — opened in the screen. "I'd like to thank the whole crew for all your effort in our great endeavor. I'd particularly like to thank you for making me look so good. I only wish it were possible now, in the moment of your greatest trial, for me to be with you. However, the Heavenly Peace has been shot down, and I am much too important to the war effort to be captured or killed.

"So I am leaving in my command pod. But I wish you every success in getting to the surface alive. If you are captured, which you surely will be if you aren't killed in the crash, please remember that you are expected to die under torture before telling them anything at all. Not that you know anything useful, but it is the principle that is important.

"Remember that you will all be eligible for citations, as long as you die under torture. If you survive, of course, you will be eligible for court martials followed by execution as deserters.

“Good luck, and gods bless.”

It was a stirring and touching speech, especially compared to Captain Kadaffi's farewell to the troops.

The music to the well-known hymn, Nearer, Whichever Deity Applies to Thee, welled up, and the words scrolled across the bottom of the screen. A beautiful picture of the sky filled the rest of the screen, punctuated by General Weissearse's private cabin-cum-escape-capsule lifting itself to safety.

Once more, Bill prepared to die.

All Bill could do was hold on for the ride.

It was a pretty good ride, if it wasn't going to end with a crash, with loops and swoops and turns and dives and an extraordinary variety of bumps and sudden turns. The pilot managed to find an instant to turn off the klaxons, but there was no way to shut down the hymns. So the deadly dive was accompanied all the way down by pious and mournful music.

Bill tried singing along to the music, but he didn't know any of the official Imperial non-denominational hymns. He only remembered one prayer — “Save me! I don't want to die” — and his repertoire of assorted screams for mercy and pleas for help was getting stale from overuse. All those responses to dire crisis that had proven so effective in the past were meaningless now.

Even though the safety belts were holding him in his seat so tightly that he could move only his face and his toes and his fingers, he was still holding on to the straps as though his life depended on it.

What his life really depended on, of course, was the skill of the pilot of the Heavenly Peace and a great deal of luck. The pilot was doing what he could, and so far the luck was holding. For one thing, none of the other Imperial ships were shooting at them, and Bill knew for certain that that had to be pure luck. For another thing, none of the Eyerackian gunners seemed to be aiming at them; this might have been luck, or maybe the ship was swerving around too much for them to hit. Or maybe the Eyerackians didn't think it was worth shooting down twice.

That didn't mean that bombs and missiles and bullets weren't zooming all around them. They were, and some of them were exploding not terribly far away. On the video screen, over the pious lyrics and the bouncing ball, Bill was getting a close-up view of the death and destruction behind the scout ship. There was some consolation in the vision of the debris and completely exploded ships that were falling down even faster than the Heavenly Peace, with even less chance of survival. But not much.

The Heavenly Peace was at least still moving forward some. Most of its motion was generally in the direction of the center of the planet, but not all. Bill hoped that they were going enough forward to make a trench in the ground, but he suspected more of a crater effect. Of course, he couldn't see anything then except the sky.

Until just before the very end, when some trees and a couple of buildings swept up into view along the bottom of the screen, moving at the same speed and in the same direction as Bill's stomach. The ship pulled out of its steepest dive and flew almost level for a good two or three seconds.

Then it hit the ground.

Crunch!

The Heavenly Peace bounced back into the air.

Crunch!

The Heavenly Peace slammed into the ground again.

Then it bounced high into the air. The back of the gun turret split open, and the video screen and the change machine went flying out.

Crunch!

The next impact broke whatever mechanism was holding all the safety straps secure.

Crunch!

On the next bounce Bill went flying out the back of the ship, not quite leaving behind the part of him that was attached to the catheter. The pain from that was enough to distract him from his otherwise incredibly painful impact on the surface of a lake.

Sploosh!

The cold water numbed his nether parts enough for Bill to start swimming toward the nearest shore.

It was a good job that he'd kept his arms in trim, working the controls of the Nintari TAIL GUNNER!, because in all that time he hadn't walked a step. His legs were utterly useless; even worse, the Swiss Army Foot weighed him down. Even with all the strength of his arms, by the time he got into the shallow water at the edge of the lake he could never have made it out without the help of two kind strangers.

The strangers each grabbed one of Bill's right arms and lifted. They carried him over to the shore and dangled his legs over the grass. “Ready?” one of them said.

“Ready,” said the other.

They let go.

Bill crunched instantly to the ground and looking up he could see his two new friends clearly. They were nice-looking fellows, big and trim (if not quite as big and trim as Bill), very polite (if not quite as polite as Bill), wearing neat, well-pressed uniforms (even neater and better pressed than Bill's).

Bill backed up a bit. Uniforms? He took a second look.

Definitely. Uniforms.

Eyerackian uniforms.

Bill was a prisoner of the ruthless, atheistic enemy.

It was bad enough that he'd survived the crash of the Heavenly Peace. That was tantamount to death and disgrace by itself. Now he was doomed to go through unspeakable tortures and die anyway. He moaned pathetically.

“Excuse me, sir?” asked one of the Eyerackians. “Are you ill?”

“Should we summon medical assistance?” asked the other.

Bill perked up. “Nurses?”

“Certainly. Doctors, too, if necessary. Will they be necessary?”

“No!” Bill shook his head vigorously. “No doctors. Just nurses. Lots of nurses!”

“Certainly, sir. And were you alone on your ship, or did you have any comrades? Will they be requiring some assistance as well?” The Eyerackians swiveled Bill around on his butt so he could see the Heavenly Peace, or its remains, on the far bank of the lake, flames leaping from the great fissures in its hull. Nothing seemed to be moving except the flames.

Bill thought for a second. For all he knew, the whole rest of the crew could be dead. For all he cared, too. But if these Eyerackians were getting ready to torture him, it could only help if he started to cooperate now. “I don't know.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“I mean, I was the tail gunner. I never saw anyone else on the ship. Once I went aboard I never even left the gun turret. That's why I can't walk. So I don't know about the rest of the crew.”

“Very well, sir.” The Eyerackian turned to his partner. “Snarki, you'd better see to it that an aid crew checks the wreck right away.”

Snarki moved a few discreet steps away and spoke into his walkie-talkie.

The first Eyerackian asked Bill, “Do you think you can make it over to that bench, sir?”

All this politeness was insidious. Bill could feel it draining his morale, moment by moment, making him more vulnerable to the hideously painful tortures that awaited him, no doubt, as soon as these two got him behind closed doors. He remembered what General Weissearse had done to him on board the Heavenly Peace; the enemy would surely do worse. But for the time being, he had no choice but to go along.

“Frankly, Trooper, I don't think I can move anywhere right now.”

The Eyerackian called to his partner, “Better get some transport for this man, too.” Snarki waved to acknowledge. “But I should correct your misapprehension, Sir,” he said to Bill.

Bill tensed. He'd never had a misapprehension corrected before, and he just knew it was going to hurt.

"We aren't troopers. These are Civil Defense uniforms. That's why we're so polite.

“Our function is to keep people safe during an attack, and help the wounded afterwards. Are you wounded?”

“I don't think so,” said Bill. “I just can't walk.”

Snarki came back over. “Spinal injury, you think?”

“No,” said his partner. “He says he isn't wounded, and there's no blood, no pain.”

“That's right,” Bill told them. “It's just that I've been strapped into my chair for a month or two. All I need is, let's see —” Bill's brain went into creative overdrive. “— lots of bed rest, physical therapy, massages twice a day, and a quart or two of medicinal alcohol each day.” Maybe they would wait until he was fully recovered before starting the torture. There was no harm in asking.

“Say, Bismire?”

“Yes, Snarki?”

“Have you noticed this man's uniform?”

“Yes, I have.” Bismire lowered his voice. “It smells rather bad, doesn't it?”

“Not that. Look at the design.”

“Oh, yes. Sad, isn't it? It desperately needs a bit of piping on the collar, some gold trim, perhaps. Anything. It completely lacks style.”

“Well, that too. But look, Bismire.” Snarki pointed to the insignia on Bill's uniform.

“By gum, Snarki, I think you're right.” Bismire put his hands on his hips and looked at Bill in an entirely new light. “This man is the enemy.”

Bill groaned. Now he was in for it. Now they would start torturing him. It was time to start praying; but to who and with what prayer he wasn't sure.

“Precisely,” Snarki said. “The enemy.”

“What do we do about that?”

“Do?”

“Yes. He's the enemy. Do we capture him, or something?”

“Oh. I see. Quite right. Have you got the rule book?”

Bismire unsnapped one of the pockets in his right pants leg and pulled out a slim volume of regulations, no larger than a Bible. He riffled through it quickly, then settled down to search the index thoroughly. “Nothing here under 'enemy.' Nothing under 'trooper,' either. Hmm.”

Look under 'torture,' Bill thought, but he didn't say it aloud.

“Try 'capture',” Snarki suggested.

“Oh, I hardly think so,” Bismire said. “We are the Civil Defense, and that would be decidedly uncivil.” But he looked anyway. It wasn't there.

Neither were “prisoner,” “POW,” “interrogate,” “third degree,” “debriefing,” “espionage,” “torture,” “inmate,” “convict,” “antagonist,” “foeman,” “combatant,” “Amalekite,” or any of the other words that Bismire or Snarki or Bill could think of.

“Well, then,” Snarki said, “it looks as though we aren't supposed to capture you.”

“So?”

“So we'll just have to see to it that you get good medical care. You've got to get back on your feet, don't you?”