Bridgehead (29 page)

The remaining half of the Monitor Group waited in the control room. They did not wear atmosphere suits—or guns. Astor and Selve stripped back their hoods as soon as they were out of the airlock. The Monitors escorting them stayed masked and faceless until Deith had closed them all within the control room.

“We have a proposal,” Selve said as if he were not aware of the psychic atmosphere.

“The Directorate has already turned it down,” Deith said from where she stood in front of the door.

Selve and Astor were in the center of the room, near the main console. Selve abandoned the fiction that all members of the Monitor Group were equals. He turned to Deith as he continued. “The Directorate has taken it under advisement. We want to explain it to you so that you can add your agreement to ours.”

“Advisement,” Deith sneered. “Rejected and you know it.”

“I know it's the best chance we'll ever have to end this war without more of our own being slaughtered!” shouted Astor as she whirled toward Deith. The Monitor stepped back by reflex and bumped the door panel.

One of the suited Monitors started to draw her gun. “Wait!” Selve shouted.

“If we wait,” Astor said, “half a million of the people out there are dead.” Her voice was loud but controlled. Instead of simply waving, she accompanied her statement with three full-armed chops in a short arc toward the outside wall. “Luck's given us a chance to smash the Vrages. You can't throw it away.”

“It isn't really luck,” Selve broke in quickly as his companion sucked in a breath. “The Vrages were bound to offset their staging area just as we did ours, so that they won't lose their homeworld to the bombs sent by rebound. They didn't need to separate their base from their bridgehead, because they were willing to sacrifice the whole assault force. It was natural that they'd have set up on one of the most Skius-like planets in the direct Skius transport column.”

“Then what matters,” retorted Deith in a deadly voice, “is that we attack at once, that we set up a perimeter on Vrage, that we emplace a World Wrecker, and that we blow their foul planet to ions!”

“But there's a better—” Selve began.

“There's no better way than following orders!” the Monitor bellowed over Selve's words.

Astor pointed her long arm straight at Deith. She said, “There's better than losing more like Keyliss! Listen to us, Deith. It could be everyone
you
know next.”

“What advantage is there to fighting the Vrages at Portal Thirty-one instead of their homeworld?” asked a Monitor wearing her ordinary uniform instead of an atmosphere suit. “The only way we can win is to destroy their planet once and for all. They're—Vrages.”

The question cooled the tension. It also made it clear that Deith's gibes had been based on more than guesswork: the proposition which Selve and Astor had gasped to the Directorate while Keyliss was being hooked to life support and replacement systems. That proposition had already been relayed to Base Four in accurate detail. Supply and communications channels from Skius to Portal Four were closed to the Portal Eleven Contact Team. That the Directorate had chosen to use those channels now, when the traces they left could be a signpost to Vrage attackers, showed desperation at the highest levels.

Astor swallowed. She crossed her hands to the opposite collarbones and gave herself a firm hug. With her eyes closed she said, across Deith's attempt to reenter the discussion, “The base is here at Portal Four so the troops could live and train under the conditions of the assault. How would you like to fight a battle here?”

“They aren't fighting a battle,” Deith snapped. “They're going to take and hold a perimeter on the Vrage homeworld for three hours until a World Wrecker can be dug down into the crust. Nobody claims we need to overrun Vrage!”

“The Vrages spotted us this time at Portal Thirty-one,” Selve said. “Where their base is, their assault force is training in oxygen just the way ours is stumbling around out there in the chlorine.”

Deith opened her mouth to interrupt. Selve made a quick, one-handed gesture with his palm up. “We slaughtered them, Deith. Astor did. I did,
me.
” He slapped his slung weapon in an attitude of disbelief. “The same way they'll do to our troops on Vrage—or would
here
if they could find us. No matter how well trained our people are, they can't fight the Vrage on a Vrage world. Not for three hours, not for one hour. We won't end the war that way.”

“Something's come through!” called a Monitor who had stayed bent over his console while arguments over the future existence of Skius rattled across the control room. “A few minutes ago, from Portal Eleven.” The readout bloomed in sapphire light above the Monitor's instruments as he separately polarized the display to face every person in the room.

“You're an idiot!” Astor said. “That's us.”

“No, he's right,” said Selve. He alone of those scanning the data could interpret it with assurance. “Somebody riding our flow, Astor. Again.”

He and his colleague broke for the doorway with such abrupt determination that instinct threw Deith out of their way before her natural hostility could try to block them.

“I'll get Security!” cried one of the armed Monitors.

“You won't!” Deith shouted back. “Come on, we're going to check this out ourselves and make sure the Directorate hears!”

She caught one of her suited fellows by the elbow and dragged him with her through the doorway to start the pursuit. Deith's right hand was fumbling with the flap of her holster.

*   *   *

This time, the second occasion the drive coils had sent Mike Gardner through what he thought was time, the sensation was that of stepping into a bath of cold water. Then he spread his legs for the sake of mental, not physical, balance and blinked while his brain finished correlating the real world with his terrified imaginings.

He was in a domed shed whose door was quivering. The light had an unpleasantly chemical appearance. It slanted through the translucent walls strongly enough to fling Gardner's shadow onto the door panel.

Mike dared fate with a deep breath. The air he drew in had a tinge of plastic and low humidity. There was none of the chlorinated lethality that he had feared. The student wet his lips and stepped briskly through the door, out into a world as bleak as an army base in winter.

The purulent yellow green of the air did not so much soften lines, the way fog would, as dissolve them in acid. Even without that, the two- and three-story buildings were stark and windowless. At first glance, the area was a single structure, like the snakes knotted behind the statue of Laocoon. Ten broad avenues leading to the hub where Gardner stood were overarched by covered bridges which managed to suggest an oil refinery rather than a willow-pattern plate.

Mike walked faster. He had begun by bending his neck stiffly toward the ground as if by not looking he would not be seen. That was foolish; his whole purpose here was to see. One thing immediately obvious was that this was not the planet Earth, however many years into the past or future one might go. The Travelers had been lying—arrogant Astor, sensitive Selve, and Keyliss, whose arm had flopped back onto the concrete at her feet that afternoon.

The pillars of the transport equipment—here black and so tall that Gardner could not pick out their tops at sunset in the turgid atmosphere—were set over a hundred yards apart. The shed in which the human intruder had appeared was at one apex of the isosceles triangle formed with the drive pillars as a base, an arrangement quite familiar to Mike Gardner. The scale at which it was constructed, however, was stunningly unexpected.

Toward Gardner slid a vehicle very nearly as broad as the entire avenue. It filled the arches over the roadway like a train through a subway tunnel. Though it was still a thousand yards distant, the engineer's mind translated scale into objective reality: thirty feet high, minimum; a hundred and fifty broad; and at least that length for stability. At least. The domed surface was studded with antennas like convex shields, too numerous to be microwave dishes and of unguessable purpose. The tubes beneath all the antennas were too like the muzzles of the Travelers' shoulder weapons to be intended for any other purpose.

There was some traffic on the others of the ten radial avenues. Vehicles the size and shape of the front half of a motor scooter zipped past or even between the central pillars. They and their orange-suited drivers were more noticeable for their motion than for shape, like flies glinting from cow to cow in a pasture. No one seemed to notice Gardner, though he was the only pedestrian in sight. Sara Jean's description of the city like a giant termite mound recurred to the young engineer. This time the words were colored by his near certainty that the city, the Travelers' home, was not on Earth, either.

Dear God in heaven.

Mike walked toward the nearest building at a pace just short of a run. The bow of the oncoming tank blinked each time the vehicle slid under the shadow of an arch. The tank was as awesomely fast as it was huge. The ground was beginning to rock. Though the whole surface was either covered or stabilized, there was enough grit to rise in a gray haze around the bow and sides of the vehicle.

A one-story appendage of the sprawling buildings reached to within thirty yards of the point at which Mike Gardner had materialized. The structure would be dwarfed by the tank, but at least it would be noticed and avoided. A lone interloper in the path of that vehicle would be swatted away as certainly as a sheep strayed onto the railroad tracks.

Mike halted with one hand flat against the wall of the building to reassure himself that it was there and protecting him. The tank slid into the circular plaza around the pillars, and what had been a parklike expanse looked suddenly like a cul-de-sac with the rusty, jagged mass of a garbage truck using it. The tank was much longer than Gardner had dreamed, four hundred and fifty, possibly five hundred feet. The dust it raised seemed to expel the vehicle from the boulevard into the hub like smoke from a gunshot. The tank passed between the pillars and, without slackening the speed which its size made seem less than the real forty-five miles an hour, bent its course up another of the radial streets.

In shocked amazement, Mike Gardner watched nine identical vehicles follow their leader. Their scale was naval, not military, and the array of weapons with which each bristled had been equaled by nothing on Earth since the battleships which took the Japanese surrender in 1945.

Gardner tried to press his left fist against his mouth and bite his knuckles through the forgotten face mask. His mind staggered with the thought of those tanks and the thousands more implied by the size of this encampment: cities blazed and fell to ruin before them, and all the screaming victims in his mind were human as their destroyers surely were not.

The sound of the airlock opening beside him was lost in greater thunder, down the boulevard and in Gardner's mind.

Someone shouted an interrogative in no Earthly language.

Mike jumped before he glanced around. Astor's fingers slid off the shoulder of the borrowed suit. Like Gardner himself, Astor was unrecognizable, with a reflection instead of a face. The intruder could see himself as an orange distortion in the rippled mask of the figure confronting him.

Beyond the person who had called to Gardner was the shorter, equally anonymous form of Selve. Selve's weapon had not been slung securely. When he stumbled through the airlock, the gun had slipped and tripped him. Now Selve carried the weapon in both hands. He was thinking only of keeping the unfamiliar burden out of his way, not at all of where the muzzle pointed.

Mike Gardner dodged around the corner of the building to avoid the unintentioned threat.

“Wait! Who are you?” Astor cried in English as she ran after the intruder.

Behind her, the airlock sprang open again. If either member of the Contact Team had thought the situation through, they would have wedged the outer door open to prevent the inner one from being used. The suited Monitors spilled out. “Grab him!” Deith ordered.

It was not until two Monitors tackled him that Selve realized he, rather than the fugitive, had been the object of the command. “No!” the Traveler said for the instant he thought that Deith had made a mistake. Then one of the Monitors wrestled the weapon away from Selve while the other one threw herself across his chest to pinion his arms and upper body.

Gardner ran down the side of the low building which had sheltered him from the traffic. It was no shelter now: the wing that thrust out into the central plaza housed a control room which stood in much the same relationship to the drive coils as did the instrument consoles controlling the lesser units on Earth. The walls were smooth and opaque with no door alcoves, window ledges, parked vehicles, or even litter to give the illusion of cover. The main building from which the wing was thrown blocked Gardner's path a hundred feet in front of him, featureless and three stories high.

“Are you trying to get killed!” Astor shouted. The step Mike had paused when he realized there was no escape gave his pursuer the opportunity she needed. Astor tackled Mike from behind, using her bulk to topple him beneath her to the ground.

“Astor?” the engineer gasped. Her voice was recognizable despite the suit and the circumstances. “What
are
you?”

“Mike? Mike?” the Traveler said as she shifted into a kneeling position. “You shouldn't have come here, you fool! Look, you'll rebound in a minute or two at the most. Stay here, wait for us, we'll—”

Four more figures in orange pounded around the corner thirty feet away. One of them had a pistol cleared.

“I've got him!” Astor shouted. She raised her left hand in prohibition. Instinct rather than conscious direction made her right shoulder twitch. The sling fell away. The gun slid down the inner curve of Astor's arm till her hand on the grip caught it.