Guardsmen of Tomorrow (13 page)

“So this one should move at two lights an hour?” Max asked.

“Well, all I can certify is that the drive that enables that speed wasn’t destroyed on this one,” the aide replied, carefully.

Max thanked her, gave her an immediate promotion in rank, and turned to the task of finding an enemy pilot to talk to us.

The first three died under questioning. Not that we tortured them. They just died as soon as we asked certain questions.

“Waste of time,” Max replied when asked if a fourth pilot should be brought to us.

“They must have been rigged with something in the brain.”

“So what now?” I asked.

“I was a pilot before I was a commander,” Max said. “I’ll figure out how to fly the damn thing myself.”

We were on our way an hour later.

Space looked different at two lights an hour-more of a paisley pattern than at one light.

“Good thing you talked Tsung-Yung into recommending that a fourth of the force be left back at Mu Cassio,” Max observed, “otherwise the General would be stark naked before the enemy now.”

“Yeah.” I turned from the paisley to the commander’s even more complex eyes.

Could he know what I’d done to Boden? What I’d considered doing to him? My plan had been to field a weaker force, so we’d lose at Iota Persei or wherever we fought the enemy. That was to have pushed Treena into bringing the smart weapon into play with her remaining force, with enough time to meet the enemy on our terms.

Instead, we’d beaten the enemy at Iota Persei. But it was a weakened enemy, because it had sent part of its unexpectedly superfast fleet to attack Treena at Mu Cas-siopeaie-a surprise attack that likely would leave her with not enough time to do anything. Or precisely the opposite of what I’d intended…

“I don’t know if we’ll arrive in time to do any good,” Max said, as if reading my thoughts. “I don’t know what I can do if we do arrive before the enemy attacks.”

“We know about their new drives,” I said. “We know that they’re a bit clumsy at close range.” I had to do what I could to keep Max from surrendering to that internal despair which could be more corrosive than an enemy’s laser.

“True,” Max said, not very heartened. “Have you heard anything more from Treena about her situation? Has she engaged the enemy as yet?” One of our communication teams had quickly installed our encodeline before we’d left.

“I don’t know,” I replied. “There’s been no communication from her in the last hour. It’s all a hash of noise now. I hope our comms aren’t breaking down on this ship.”

“Let’s just pray that Perseus can save Cassiopeia again.”

“Again?”

“An ancient myth,” Max said. “Let’s hope we can make it true in the present.”

The first evidence we saw upon coming out of paisley space was bad.

Dozens of our ships drifting numbly in the void beyond Mu Cassiopeaie’s stony twelfth planet, spent shells like glittering chrysalides moving vacantly away from the deathblows that had dispatched them…

“All of them are ours,” I barely managed to say. “Where are theirs?”

“I don’t know,” Max said, in a voice no louder than mine.

He tried to reach Treena again on our encodeline. There was no reply.

“That looks like less than half of Treena’s force out there,” Max said, straining to make some sense out of what we saw. “A strange sort of rout to have just a portion of one side’s force destroyed, and none at all of the other’s. There’s something more going on here.”

“You think the General may have
sacrificed
this part of her limited forces?” I asked.

I wasn’t sure why that would have occurred to me.

Maybe because just a day or two earlier I had been contemplating the sacrifice of a far larger part of our fleet, out near Iota Persei, for what seemed a justifiably greater good to me. AH of that seemed very far away now.

I thought of this small part of Treena’s fleet coming out here, well beyond the twelfth planet of Mu Cassiopeaie, to be massacred by the enemy. That would account for why all the lead vessels were ours.

“But why would she do that?” I continued.

Max shook his head, half in response to me, half in response to another view he had called up on the big screen.

The space around Mu Cassiopeaie’s sixth planet-a ringed thing, like Sol’s Saturn-came sharply into focus.

“Oh, no,” I said.

The enemy fleet, huge in comparison to ours, was feasting on our vessels.

“What the hell’s going on?” Max demanded of our ships, though none could hear him. “We’re not even putting up a fight!”

I tried to count the number of our vessels on the screen. I asked Max to change the angles of the views. “There really aren’t too many of ours there,” I said. “Maybe a fifth to a fourth of what’s out here.”

Max sighed. He shook his head in anger, confusion, frustration. “So she still has almost half the force back in reserve to defend the fourth planet.” He fiddled with the screen controls. He pounded the console. “The alignment of planets is blocking our view. We can wait eighty-five minutes, or we can move in for a better look.”

“Let’s move.”

Max nodded. “But why sacrifice so much of her force?” he asked, picking up my question. “Whatever Treena has planned, surely she’d be better off with more on her side.”

We finally caught a brief sight of what remained of Treena’s fleet, hovering around Mu Cassiopeaie’s fourth planet-the sylvan capital of our realm.

“No wonder we couldn’t see her before,” Max said. The huge enemy fleet was swooping in toward Treena and our planet, in a double, undulating formation that made each of its segments look like the wings of a single, horrendous creature.

“When the planet alignment wasn’t blocking our view, that monstrosity of a fleet was.”

One of its wings flapped, and Treena’s force was again obscured. Max tried again to reach her encodeline, again in vain.

The enemy wings seemed to swell and advance, now seeming to loom over the fourth planet itself. I thought of people eating breakfast, children laughing, couples strolling, all under that enemy shadow. It was an agonizing scene.

“Strange,” Max said, focusing not on the view screen but the encodeline. “At this range, it almost seems as if Treena is deliberately not answering us, not that her transmitter is engulfed in noise.”

“How so?” I asked, eyes still on the view screen. “Like an eagle about to swallow a sparrow back on Earth. She doesn’t have a chance,” I said about the awful view.

“Well, her transmitter is indicating that it’s receiving our message,” Max answered about the communication. He shook his head, and then joined me at the view screen.

Something peculiar was beginning to occur upon it. Little pieces of the enemy fleet seemed to be burning up-little tears in the cavernous wings. They were soon repaired as enemy vessels shifted subtly in formation, but holes seemed to be appearing faster than they were fixed.

“Do you see that?” I asked Max.

He nodded. His face looked puzzled-and almost a little frightened, in a way I hadn’t seen before. “Let’s go for extreme magnification,” he said to me, and the view screen took it as a command.

The tears became gaping holes on close-up, and the cause of them became clear.

Treena’s vessels were engaging the enemy’s, one by one, and winning every time.

I took a quick look at Max. His mouth was open.

It wasn’t that our ships were moving much faster than the enemy’s. That wasn’t it.

It was rather that our ships were moving in totally unfamiliar ways-darting in and out, changing speeds seemingly at random, hot needles rending the wings of the massive enemy eagle in ways it apparently could neither predict nor fathom.

I was frightened, too. But I think I was also smiling.

The huge wings were more than wounded now. The enemy tried repeatedly to re-form, but there were too many holes, too many dead cells, to fill. The wings began to crum-ble, shrivel, like old paper under myriad points of fire-the fire of our proud vessels. Soon all that was left of the enemy fleet around Mu Cassiopeaie were ashes…

Treena’s image-appeared on our view screen. Max commanded it to send ours back to hers.

She acknowledged Max, then looked right past him at me. “Congratulations,” she said. “You got what you wanted.”

The three of us walked along the shore, not far from where I had walked with Tsung-Yung in what felt like a millennium but was less than two weeks ago.

“There were two reasons I had to sacrifice so many of our vessels,” Treena said to Max and me. “One, of course, was to lure the enemy in.”

“Of course,” Max agreed. “But why sacrifice so many?”

“There wasn’t time to reprogram the robots in those ships to work with the humans piloting mine. Nor was there time to train my human pilots in how to work with totally robotic vessels. I had all I could do to get them up to speed on how to kill enemy vessels. Good thing human piloting has remained a form of pageantry sport on some of our worlds-I called every last one of those performers in for this. Their training is remarkably much the same as that prescribed in the ancient war manuals.”

“Good thing?” Max asked, unable to mask his sarcasm.

Treena looked at him. “I like it no better than you. I resisted as long as I could.”

Max was unconvinced. “We’ve kept the unpredictable fury of the human soul out of direct combat for nearly as long as humans have traversed the stars. It’s the only thing that has enabled this civilization to progress, to move on, despite our sick penchant for war.”

“We can control it,” Treena insisted. “I was there. I commanded my own ship, and took out six enemy vessels. It was
invigorating
-like nothing else I’ve ever felt. But I can control it.”

She had a wild look in her eyes that made me wonder.

Max, however, was sure. “No, you can’t. You won’t be able to. It’s too intoxicating for you. For thousands of years we’ve had the sense to keep humans away from this-that’s why, for the most part, civilians have been spared. If human brains, human angers, become the payload of our weapons, you’ll get death for everyone.”

Max was shaking. “No, it was wrong of you to break the ban against the smart weapon-”

“Commander, calm down-” Treena began.

“No, I won’t,” Max was shouting. “You’re wrong.” And he raised a gun to Treena.

He started to say something, but I had my scrambler out and pointed at Max before he could finish. I couldn’t take any chances. He was brain dead a split second later.

Treena stared at me and then Max on the ground, in horror.

“It’s all right,” I said, with more surety in my voice than my circuitry. “You did the right thing.”

As had I.

After all, Max and I were only robots-like all military in this realm of ours until now, other than the Supreme General. And robots would be more expendable than ever in this new regime of the human weapon Treena had just brought into being.

THE END

by Andre Norton

Andre Norton has written and collaborated on over one hundred novels in her sixty years as a writer, working with such authors as Robert Bloch, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Mercedes Lackey, and Julian May. Her best known creation is the Witch World, which has been the subject of several novels and anthologies. She has received the Nebula Grand Master Award, the Fritz Leiber Award, and the Daedalus Award. She lives in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, where she oversees High Hallack, a genre-writers’ library.

The Guardian lay belly down on the sun-heated rocks, as flat as if his yellow-furred skin held no body. In the wide canyon below, the intruder crawled at an even pace, seemingly undeterred by the rough ground. There were no signs of any legs below its oval bulk, no other signs of propulsion. It might be a Fos beetle swollen to an unbelievable size.

Almost directly below the Guardian’s perch, it halted. Sound carried easily as a portion of the nearer side swung up. Movement there, then first one and a second creature emerged to stand beside the crawler, pointing to the rock wall and uttering loud noises.

The Guardian froze. It could not be true! For all the generations his breed had kept watch, there had been no such coming. Still, on the wall below were carved, painted, set so deeply that time had not erased, representations of figures akin to these invaders.

One of them ran back to the beetle, returning with a box. Holding that up with forepaws, the creature made a slow passage before the wall from one end of the procession to the other.

The Guardian’s muscles tightened as he gathered his feet under him, rumbling a growl deep in his throat. What did they do? Was this offering a threat to the Far Time? Might they even be trying to wipe away this message of the Great Ones?

He edged backward. Now he could no longer watch them, but it was time he followed orders. These intruders looked so much like the pictures he had seen from cubhood.

Following a trail worn by countless generations of his kind, he pushed between two spurs into the opening behind. His claws were well extended, searching for holds as he passed into darkness.

It had been four seasons since the last inspection, but there had seldom been trouble with rockfalls. He dropped into a long chamber. Though the right-hand wall seemed intact, there were concealed openings that emitted enough light to serve a race with well-developed night sight. In turn, those offered spy holes.

He could hear sounds, meaningless to any pattern he understood, and sensed rising excitement. Two strides brought him to the nearest spy hole.

The invaders were just below him, and he studied them carefully for the report he must make. Like the Great Ones, they walked on their hind legs and were tailless.

Their forepaws easily handled objects. But they were not altogether alike-the fur on the head of one was grayish while the other had a fire-red patch.

He began to understand that the constant sound was their form of communication.

They would not-or could not- touch mind patterns in the proper manner. But perhaps-One could contact a spas, though the winged ones of the heights were certainly not People, and those of the waterways also used mind touch. Dared he try such with these?