The Creatures of Man (54 page)

"You want to fight the Lonnies?" gasped the general.

"Why not?" she demanded. "They're the enemies of Prima Gran, aren't they? They would kill me if they could. Besides, I don't relish spending my time gossiping with your camp followers. And if I'm in the fight, maybe I can cut the number of you boneheads who get killed before I figure out how to make you come home. How about it?"

"You're on! Gromon, Green-Ten has lost a couple of snipers lately. Take this recruit over to Green Camp and tell Dak Surants she's his new man."

Two days later Gweanvin was approaching her first battle station, on or nearly on Jopat's equator. The jungle was slightly less dense than a typical rain-forest because Jopat has fifteen percent less than typical E-world moisture. And as she flitted through the tree trunks and hanging vines on semi-inert, Gweanvin passed through several flare-burned clearings in various stages of regrowth, evidence that there had been plenty of shooting in the area although it was not a favorite battle zone.

A mile and a half short of her assigned spot, she dropped to the ground, went inert, and reported in.

"Rocket to Axe."

"Axe here, Rocket,"
responded Dak Surants' voice.

"Rocket in place," she reported.
"Oke and out."

She had wondered if Surants would challenge her "in place" claim when she was obviously short of her assigned position. He had not, but probably he would raise hell about it later.

But Gweanvin had worked under cover entirely too much to start taking damn-fool risks in the manner of the careless and rather lazy barbs. She had no intention of doing a semi-inert flit all the way to her post. Functioning transport implants, with their high power-drain, were too easily detected. She meant to walk the rest of the way with power packs at minimal output.

And walk it she did, in less than thirty minutes, using no life-support other than a tight shieldscreen to ward off the brambles she shoved through and to provide necessary air-conditioning against the heat. On enemy detectors she would be little more noticeable than a large native animal stomping through the undergrowth.

When she reached her assigned spot she climbed into the highest, sturdiest tree she could locate—still moving under muscle-power alone—and found a concealed perch. Then she settled down to wait for action.

She drew her zerburst pistol and studied its settings thoughtfully. The gun was basically a laser projector, the characteristics of its lance and flare governed principally by the intensity of the beam. At lowest intensity it produced a lance which never flared—merely a bolt of monochromatic light. That bolt would punch through the hardest shieldscreen as if it were not there and drill deeply into whatever flesh, stone or metal it struck.

But above a certain intensity threshold, so high that the light-energy took on aspects of mass, relativistic effects came into play. The front end of the lance propagated at normal light-velocity for the medium through which it was traveling. Because its concentration was such as to make it behave like mass, however, it underwent spacetime contraction, this effect increasing in magnitude from the front end of the lance to the rear. The net result was that the rear portions of the lance propagated progressively faster than the speed of light. That caused the lance to telescope in upon itself until, at flarepoint, its length came so close to zero, and its raving energy so closely confined, as to constitute a time-space "singularity"—an unsustainable state. So it flared, releasing nearly all the energy of the entire lance at one point and in one tiny fraction of a nanosecond.

The higher the intensity of laser beam fired, the more quickly it would flare. Maximum practical flare range was about two million miles—a very weak flare—and minimum was a mile and a quarter. At that short range the gunner ran a real risk of getting a bad case of sunburn from his own flare.

All in all, the zerburst pistol was an excellent weapon for Guardsmen, operating in space but in the near vicinity of their planet. But for ground-fighting or aerial combat? "Lousy," Gweanvin muttered to herself.

She realized she could not argue with her weapon, even though she could think of three other types of handguns she had used in the past that would be preferable in her present situation. The point was that the zerburst gun was the weapon of the Guardsmen. It was their baby. And of course they would not consider using anything else in their private little war on Jopat.

She turned the beam down to low, non-flaring intensity, with maximum-duration lance. She could change it back quickly if she spotted Lonnies stupid enough to be bunched so that a flare could catch several. Otherwise, she would rely on the accuracy of her aim to drill—maybe slash—any singletons she spotted.

Jopat's sun climbed higher in the sky. And higher. It was overhead. It crept lower. And lower.

A helluva lousy way to play a game, fumed Gweanvin. It dawned on her that there might not be any action at all in her sector that day. Or the following day.

But she had agreed to play by the barbs' rules. That meant she did not desert her post, no matter how little action came her way.

It was midafternoon before she heard Dak Surants snap:
"Motor through Target, ho the fox!"

That meant someone had spotted enemy elements approaching the line on which she was posted. Probably forward scouts on anti-sniper patrol, she guessed. Such deployment was a standard opening move, according to what she had been told.

She killed her shieldscreen and gasped when the sullen heat of the jungle, no longer held at bay, hit her like a blow. But detectable power usage was now down to the barely perceptible trickle required for sense amplification and emo-monitoring. Until she used her gun, an enemy would have to look at her to know she was there.

Minutes later she detected a Lonnie advancing on a line that would take him through the trees a thousand yards to her left.

The incautious speed of his advance indicated that he was not really expecting opposition here. Gweanvin guessed that, as she had hoped, Lonnie observers had pinpointed her at the spot a mile and a half north where she had made her last comm transmission and switched off her transport implants. The passing Lonnie seemed to be making for that spot.

She let him go by.

Less than a minute later three more Lonnies came into detection, well spread out, following the lead man. None would pass within feet of her, so as to actually be visible through the curtains of foliage. But all would pass within reasonable range for detection-aiming.

They arrived abreast of her. She blazed away with the zerburst gun, first to the left, where two of the barbs were passing, then to the right, her lances of light
stoom-stoom
ing through the air and vegetation in tight patterns that riddled the vague detection images of the enemy barbs.

Without pause, she flicked into semi-inert mode just long enough to streak down from her perch. Before touching ground she had returned her comm to the frequency Lonnie patrols were using. She caught the garbled but identical reports made by two of the downed men. From the third came only silence. Conclusion: two wounded, one dead.

She was running northward. Her perch would no longer be tenable, of course. For several seconds, vapor trails marking the passage of her zerburst lances would hang whitely in the air, pointing telltale fingers back to their source point for any aerial observer to see—and as soon as the nearest wounded Lonnie could move himself to a safe distance, that tree would be the target for a Lonnie flare.

And that lead Lonnie—the one supposed to have drawn her fire—was up ahead somewhere. She didn't like the idea of leaving him to her north while she was looking for action from the south. He just might try to sneak back on her . . .

He did. Almost, but not quite, as cautious as she, he was coming through the concealing ground growth toward her, his transport implants off. But his shieldscreen was on, while Gweanvin was suffering unprotected the stings, scratches and heat of her jungle run.

She halted when she detected him, aimed her gun, and stood puffing while she waited for him to emerge into visual contact. When he did . . .

"Hi!" she chirped. He had an instant in which to view her grin before she lanced him through the brain.

Immediately she activated her shieldscreen, and with only seconds to spare before the expected flare erupted back at her vigil tree. The airblast bounced her around for a moment.

"Axe to Rocket, report," Surants' voice demanded.

She was up and flitting hurriedly toward the spot of the flare, taking advantage of the detection-jamming miasma of ionization from induced radioactivity that would hang over the spot for several seconds.

She tongued her toothmike. "Two Lonnies killed, two wounded. Out."

"You're drawing the crowd. Out." replied Surants.

Which meant that the ruckus she had stirred up was going to make her the focus of the coming battle. That was often the way the barb battles developed—each side pouring forces into the scene of the hottest action.

The Lonnies would be eager to blast the Granny sniper who had so quickly disposed of an entire anti-sniper patrol.

She dived into the small crater now marking the site of the tree in which she had perched, and went full inert. The backwind had littered the ground with smoldering embers so she had to keep up her shieldscreen. Tumbling to the deepest, most sheltered position the hole offered, she halted in a crouch, peering up through the drifting smoke with zerburst gun held ready. She had switched it to flare intensity, range tentatively set at a mile and a half.

Ten seconds, fifteen seconds . . . Lances appeared, three of them simultaneously, foreshortened because they were aimed close to her position. Gweanvin upped her gun's range to three miles and fired back at the source of one lance before glare and flying debris and hard gusts of superheated air made aiming impossible. Her crater was now the center of a pattern of four craters—then of six, then of eight, as two of the aerial gunners fired again and again.

Rocks and dust, tree trunks and splinters—chunks of debris of all shapes and sizes—were raining down on her. Impatiently she maintained her crouch, protected by the shieldscreen, and waited for the worst of the deluge to end so she could jump over to one of the newer and therefore safer holes.

But when the stuff stopped falling, she was completely buried in it . . . a good fifteen feet deep! Her hole was now a mound slammed together by the pattern of surrounding blasts, and she was under it. She cursed.

Not that she couldn't get out. That would be easy enough. But in so doing she would use so much power as to draw the fire of every Lonnie within range. She was effectively immobilized.

And outside the battle was getting hot. She could detect it fuzzily through the junk piled on top of her.

"Axe to Rocket!"
came the concerned voice of Surants.

"Oh, shut up," she said crossly, then hit him with a string of utterly blue vulgarities, making clear her total disdain for this simple-minded and primitively pointless little war game.

"Glad you're in one piece, Rocket." he responded lamely.

"Go take a barbed-wire enema, you anachronism. Out!" She settled down to wait out the battle, mindful that the wait might end any instant if a stray flare caught her mound, but not fretting about the possibility.

It was three hours after sunset before all was quiet above. From comm talk she had listened in on, Gweanvin gathered the Grannies were claiming an overwhelming victory, which was not surprising. Thanks to the rules under which they fought, the Lonnies and Grannies were usually so evenly matched in combat that any unanticipated success or failure could set a trend that would hold throughout a battle. And Gweanvin's victory at the very outset, from which she had emerged vitriolically alive though discomfited, was more than enough to carry the day.

She was mildly pleased by this. As she had told General Dargow, a main reason she wanted to get into the war was to keep as many Primgranese Guardsmen as possible alive to return to duty in the Commonality. If that entailed killing Lonnies before they could kill her Grannies, so be it.

The annoying thing was that she still had not the slightest idea how to get those vac-skull Guardsmen to stop this stupidity and go home. Why bother keeping them alive just to waste themselves playing bang-bang-you're-dead?

She spent most of her hours of burial trying to think of a plan. She had been told to get a first-hand acquaintance with the Jopat situation, and formulate a scheme based on that direct knowledge. So she tried to formulate. The result was a big empty zero.

The damned barbs were where they wanted to be, doing what they wanted to do. And they knew what their duties in the Commonality were like—that their little game here was a war much more to their taste than the econo-war.

And though she called them stupid, she knew they were not weak-minded. They knew what they liked—that was for sure. And nobody was going to trick them into thinking they would like something else better when experience told them otherwise.

So . . . what should she do? What
could
she do?

Not a damned thing.

She sighed finally and returned her attention to her surroundings. All was still above. The battle was over and the barbs had retired.

Slowly she expanded her shieldscreen, employing it as an earthmover. The debris yielded stubbornly with creaks and scrapings as she poured power into the screen. The surface of the mound bulged up. Rocks and tree trunks rolled and toppled down its sides, and the bulge pushed up still higher. Finally an opening appeared at the top and Gweanvin, semi-inert, squirted herself through it, the hole collapsing back as she lifted above the dark treetops and streaked northward.

When she reached the Green-Ten camp she dropped quietly to the ground, hoping the barbs had left her some supper. More than food was waiting for her. Her arrival triggered a celebration, in the loud, tumultuous barb style, that lasted into the morning hours. She was hugged, kissed, fondled and fed until she nearly turned on her shieldscreen in self-defense.