Bill 7 - the Galactic Hero (13 page)

The monument wasn't right at the end of the aisle, but off to the left a little. Right at the end was a big pile of rubble. Bill couldn't look around much — every time he tried to turn his head Sid or Sam would whisper “Eyes front!” and, trained to obey or get clobbered as he was, he would look straight ahead. But what he could see of the area seemed to include a lot of other big piles of rubble, and buildings whose tops had been blown off, and, on one side of the aisle, one big crater that had partly filled with water. It looked like someone had bombed the bowb out of this town.

Bill finally got to the end of the long avenue between the barricades. The big pile of rubble had once been a building, and not too long ago, to judge by the rescue crews standing beside it, still sweaty and grimy. A big metal sign, twisted and with a hole in the middle, lay on the ground nearby. Despite its condition, Bill could read it easily.

AIR-RAID SHELTER — MAXIMUM CAPACITY 600 CIVILIANS was what it said.

Bill executed a smart left-face and took the few steps up to the monument as slowly as he could. He knew where he'd seen that sign before; could it be a coincidence that he was seeing it again?

The monument was just some more rubble, but welded together into a small column. Engraved into the plasteel girders was a long list of names.

Bill leaned the wreath gently up against the base of the column and said, “In honor of the dead,” just as he'd been instructed. He stood at attention and gave his unique two-handed salute.

All the way to their next stop on the tour, Sam and Sid couldn't get him to say anything.

Bill zigzagged across the parking lot, hurdling a couple of small craters, his instincts telling him when to swerve away from an incoming bomb and when to dive into a larger crater for cover. One more large explosion, and he leaped out and forward again. He looked back and waved an arm to summon his comrades. “Follow me,” he shouted.

He vaulted an overturned hovercar and ducked behind it to see if they were coming.

Sam and Sid weren't nearly as good at this as Bill was, but they were getting the hang of it. Fortunately, the Imperial Troopers weren't strafing; they weren't even attacking seriously. The bodyguards caught up, but before they could catch their breath Bill led them on a final dash across the last few yards into one of the few buildings still standing.

The two Eyerackians collapsed, gasping, into the nearest chairs. Bill, however, had not yet reached his goal, and he marched up to the counter.

“Three SuperHestburgers, three double beers. Fast,” he said. “To stay.” He turned back to Sid and Sam. “What do you guys want?”

An explosion rattled the windows, and the girl behind the counter ducked for cover. By the time she reemerged, Bill had the rest of his order. “One Chilly-Chili, One Horse Dog, a large Tranqui-Cola.”

He carried the trays over to their table.

“Gee, Bill, we were sure lucky.”

“Yeah, imagine finding an open Burger Barn. I haven't had a burger since ... since ... maybe I've never had one before. But I've seen the commercials!” Bill washed down the first burger with the first beer, in one gulp each.

The girl behind the counter turned on the holovision. A miniature President Grotsky, a little thinner than when Bill had met him and looking more than ever just like Sam and Sid, stood on the counter. “The war is going about as well as can be expected,” he said, “under the circumstances. Casualties are pretty high on both sides, and there's a lot of nasty stuff falling out of the sky all over — rockets, bombs, shrapnel, pieces of airplanes and spaceships. I really suggest you stay indoors. The underground malls and tunnel trains are a good idea. Personally, I'm planning on staying in my bunker for the time being.”

“Gee, poor old Millard doesn't sound terribly inspirational, does he, Sid?”

“No, Sam, he doesn't. But he is under a lot of pressure, after all.”

“True enough, Sid. But at least he doesn't have to eat at Burger Barn.” Sam poked reluctantly at his Horse Dog. “I don't think there's even any real horse in this thing.”

“Doesn't have to?” Bill said with artificial ingredients dripping down his chin. “All this stuff is made from real processed meat-like food-type product. You can't get anything this good in the Troopers.”

Sid nodded. “That explains why they're so aggressive.”

Bill shoveled the last of his meal into his mouth, chewed two or three times, and swallowed. “Uuurrrppp,” he eructed. “That was good. What's our next stop?”

“The neutron mine. At least we'll be safe there. Everything's underground, including the barracks where we'll be staying. Some of the bombs were a little too close for comfort last night.”

“You worry too much. They didn't even come close to the hotel.” After a week of touring in areas that were under attack, Bill had gotten blasé about it. Since nobody was really aiming at him, he didn't take it as personally as he did when he was still aboard the Heavenly Peace. Although secretly he was happily looking forward to getting into a nice, safe, deep mine.

Sam gathered the trays and carried them over to the recycling bin, where the trash would be reprocessed into more GungeBurgers. He stopped at the counter to see General Weissearse's latest press briefing on the holovision.

A junior officer introduced him. “Heeeere's Wormy!”

A military band played the general's theme music, the reporters broke into applause, and Stormy Wormy Weissearse came through the curtains onto the stage. He let the applause go on for a while, then said “Thank you, thank you.” As the crowd grew quiet, he continued, “How many Eyerackians does it take to screw in a light bulb?”

The press corps, right on cue, shouted in unison, “How many?”

“Only two, but they have to be really tiny.”

The mandatory uproarious laughter stopped at the general's signal.

"In the last twenty-four hours, Imperial forces launched just over twelve million missions against Eyerack, bringing the total for the war so far to nearly one hundred fifty million. Almost the entire Eyerackian air defense was eliminated five days ago, but six missiles were fired at Imperial ships from mobile launchers today.

“Our precision bombing was concentrated on defense industries today. We have a randomly selected and completely unedited tape to show the results of one of these attacks.”

General Weissearse was replaced on the counter top by the same picture Bill and the bodyguards had seen earlier. The missile, this time described as a smart bomb guided by remote control, bored in on the same red dot. The sign on the building was different, though. Now it read “MISSILE FACTORY: LEGITIMATE MILITARY TARGET.”

"We have an unconfirmed report of a teenaged girl being bruised by a piece of falling litter that was accidentally ejected from one of our bombers. If this turns out to be correct, that will bring the total of Eyerackian civilian casualties to two since the beginning of the campaign. Anything else you may have heard is only enemy propaganda.

"A turret gunner on the Imperial Cruiser Bomfog sustained a blister on his trigger finger. This makes seven injuries of all sorts to Imperial forces. No ships have been shot down. Anything else you may have heard is only enemy propaganda.

“The campaign is going exactly according to plan. Anything else you may have heard is only enemy propaganda.”

Sam joined Sid and Bill by the door.

Bill pointed up into the sky. “We're just waiting for that dog fight to finish.” A light rain of spent bullets and debris was pocking what was left of the pavement outside. There was a small explosion far above. “Fighter,” Bill murmured. “Yours.” Moments later, another small explosion. “Yours again.” Tiny dots maneuvered around in the blue, only slightly obscured by smoke. Bill's practiced eye, and a fair assurance that the other two wouldn't know enough to contradict anything he said, let him describe the action. The sound effects might not have been strictly necessary, but they were fun to make. “Ack-ack-ack! Kabloom! Ka-bloom! Phloosh! Spang! Spang!”

At last there was another explosion, larger than the others. “Escort destroyer,” Bill said. “Imperial. That does it. Let's go.”

They sprinted a couple of hundred yards across the cratered parking lot to the armored hoverlimo, which hadn't been able to get any closer to the Burger Barn. The car hadn't taken much damage while they were eating — only a couple of new dents in the roof; that right headlight had been broken a couple of days earlier.

The rest of the trip to the neutron mine was basically uneventful. They were strafed twice, blown off the road once by a nearby bomb, had to ford two rivers where bridges had ceased to exist, and six times had to cross fields and frontyards for stretches of up to five Imperial miles because the road had been churned to the consistency of cottage cheese. All in all, they made the trip of fifty miles in less than four hours.

Most mines have a lot of equipment by the entrance, to handle the ore or whatever they are bringing to the surface, but not this one. Neutrons, after all, are very small, and lots and lots of them can go in a fairly small package. So a neutron mine (or at least this one, and this one was, after all, the only one in the universe), from the outside, looked like a road leading into an underground parking garage. An underground parking garage with armed sentries and blastproof armored doors.

The blast doors swung open into a clean, well-lighted chamber. The only other mine Bill had ever seen was a guano mine he'd toured as part of his preliminary training to be a Technical Fertilizer Operator (his greatest non-hormonal dream, now, alas, never to be fulfilled), and this one looked nothing like that one. For one thing, the place was not covered with guano dust. Despite his deep appreciation for fertilizer in all its forms, Bill really had to consider this an advantage.

The neutron mine, in fact, looked more like a factory — at least in its upper levels. There actually was a parking garage, and after that a small room with a receptionist in a skin-tight jumpsuit. She was studiously ignoring the visitors, but Bill had difficulty ignoring her. She was a little on the plumpish side, but definitely pneumatic, with masses of curly blonde hair. She was everything Bill looked for in a woman; which is to say, she was a woman.

Bill sidled up to the reception desk to meet the receptionist, but Sid cut him off at the pass. Or actually, before he could make a pass.

“Sid and Sam, Presidential Guards, with Bill, Celebrity Prisoner of War, to see the director. He's expecting us.”

The receptionist put her romance holonovel on pause, took off her earphones, popped her gum, and looked the trio over. “Not in those outfits. We run a respectable neutron mine here.” She slapped a bell on her desk and called, “Front!” A small robot popped out of the wall and rolled over. “You'll find cleansuits in the closet. Everyone wears cleansuits in here. Keep them sealed at all times. Don't try to smuggle any neutrons out of the mine. Got it?” Without waiting for a response, she told the robot, “Take these three to guest suite 8, make sure they change, and bring them back here. Dismissed.” She popped her gum again and picked up the earphones.

“What about our luggage?” Sam asked.

The receptionist sighed, put down her earphones again, and looked at the men. “I don't see any luggage.”

“It's in the car.”

“You can worry about that after you see the director. He's expecting you in ten minutes, and you've just wasted thirty seconds of it.” She jammed the earphones on her head and started the holonovel again. Tiny half clothed translucent figures grappled on top of her desk.

The robot was already halfway down the hall, going around a corner. They caught it just before it got on the elevator, then followed it through a maze of hallways and into a small suite.

It was called a suite, but it didn't have much in common with a hotel besides having two bedrooms and a living room. The entire space, including the furniture, had apparently been extruded in one piece. It was soft and cozy, as far as plasticrete went, which wasn't very far. It was sturdy and durable — you could take a sledgehammer to any of the chairs without doing any damage — and about as comfortable as a rock.

“You have two minutes and eighteen seconds to change your clothes,” the robot intoned. “Then I will lead you back to the reception desk. Brevet Lance Corporal Bill, your room is on the right.” It retracted its legs and displayed a countdown clock showing how much time they had left.

Bill rushed into his room, ripping off his clothes as he went. Selecting a new outfit was easy — he could take one of the white cleansuits, or another one. They were all the same. He did appreciate the chevron that had been painted on the sleeve, though.

Just over two minutes later, Bill and his bodyguards were hopping down the hallway after the robot, still pulling on their suits and trying to figure out how to seal the seams. When they got to the front desk again, they were holding the cleansuits together with two hands.

The receptionist looked up at them, popped her eyes and took in their predicament. “Look,” she said, standing, “it's simple.” She demonstrated on herself; Bill paid especially close attention, although not to the process she was teaching. “Just press here and here, slide your hand along here, rub these two together, press here, and pull here. Got it?” Sam and Sid looked blank. Bill looked excited. But somehow they got themselves sealed up.

A bell chimed on the desk, and a door slid open in the corner. The receptionist sat down again. “The director will see you now.” She turned all her attention back to her holonovel.

The door slid shut behind them, sealing the trio into a small room of the same style as their suite. It was the same extruded plasticrete, with one bench. They perched tentatively on the bench, facing the only variation in the room, a large square smooth patch on the wall.

“THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU!” A disembodied voice blasted out of nowhere. “Sorry, Let me turn down the volume. It's a real honor to have you here, let me tell you.”

Bill looked around. “Am I missing something?” he asked in a whisper.

“I don't think so,” Sid replied.