Tactical Error (3 page)

“You know, that was an exceedingly stupid idea,” Lenna remarked
as she stretched. All of her bones felt as if they had been rammed together.

“It was your exceedingly stupid idea,” Bill reminded her with
the perfect honesty that came from perfect innocence.

Lenna frowned as she began tossing her packs over his back. “You never
have learned the meaning of discretion.”

“It is hard to be discreet when you weigh the better part of a
ton.”

Sometimes, when they were alone for days or weeks on end, Lenna wished more
than anything that Bill possessed the spontaneity to engage in real
conversation. Then, on some rare occasion such as this, Bill would do his best,
and Lenna was reminded that she was probably better off with a reticent robot.

She turned to survey the horizon to the west, knowing that the approach path
of the freighter was to have left her due east of the base. She had no idea of
the distance. The drop was to have been where some landform, such as the ridge
several kilometers to the west, offered protection from scan and radar. Without
any good maps of the planet, finding such a place as that had been entirely a
matter of chance. They could be ten kilometers short of their target, or a
thousand. If they could make their way to higher ground, then she could put
Bill’s optical scanners and sensors to the task.

“Let’s be on with it, then,” she said, rapping
affectionately on the sentry’s hull. “I’ve got to keep moving
before I freeze.”

“I contain no material which could freeze at the predicted
temperatures for this environment,” Bill offered for reasons that no one
could begin to guess.

“Bully for you.”

Leading the way, Lenna started out across the ice field. This was going to
be hard walking. She was really not cold because of the self-warming arctic
gear; she never had to worry about freezing, as long as she had a spare set of
fresh batteries to charge from Bill’s generator. But the loose snow and
broken rock and ice would make for very rough going. She had grown up in a
world that was as mountainous as it was wintry, although she had been an artist
and a part-time pilot rather than a ranger in the wild. She was most worried
about Bill, and what might happen if he fell over into a tight place. He was so
heavily armored that he weighed quite a lot, and he had two sets of legs but no
hands.

“It was a better plan than your first one,” Bill proffered after
more than a minute of walking.

Lenna turned to stare at him. It took her a moment to realize just what he
was talking about, their discussion of the stupidity of her plan for getting
them down having been brief and some time past.

She shrugged, resuming their march. “I don’t see how it could
have been worse. Riding in to our destination inside a missile and then
parachuting down would hardly have been a rougher ride, as long as the
parachute opened at the end. It would have saved us this long walk in.”

“I would not have fit inside a missile,” Bill explained in a
voice that conveyed simple, patient logic.

“Oh, excuse me!”

“Would you like for me to shut up?”

“No, not at all. Who else would I have to talk to, out here in the
middle of nowhere? I am at your mercy.” She paused, having seen a small
movement in the snowfield just ahead. “What was that?”

“What was what?” Bill asked.

Lenna saw something move again, and pointed. “Look!”

“Look!”
An entire course of small, high-pitched voices
echoed her.

Lenna could have tripped over her own face, she was so surprised. She looked
around, finding herself in the middle of a vast complex of small holes
skillfully hidden in the ice. A considerable number of the holes held small,
white-furred animals standing upright just above their burrows, peering at her
with bright eyes and perked ears. They were about the size of a very small dog,
certainly nothing for her to worry about. At least not as long as she had that
walking battleship staring over her shoulder.

“What are those things?” Lenna asked quietly. All the
information there was to be had on this planet had been downloaded into
Bill’s secondary memory storage.

“Ice gophers,” the sentry explained simply, then seemed to shift
gears. “Extensive colonies of ice gophers, numbering anywhere from less
than a dozen to several hundred, are borrowed into the ice of glaciers and ice
fields. The small but hardy pseudo-mammals are intelligent and gregarious, and
are noted to be very curious and fearless. The members of the colony are in
continual and apparently extensive vocal communication, defending their
colonies through the diligence of constant sentries. Their most remarkable
trait is their ability to mimic the sound of other animals, even complex
speech, with truly amazing clarity.”

“Thus spake Zarathustra,” Lenna said under her breath.
“Knowing our friends, they probably have an entire colony of vast
proportions surrounding their damned base. Hello!”

“Hello!”
several dozen ice gophers obligingly called
back.

“Heigh-dee heigh-dee ho!”

“Heigh-dee heigh-dee ho!

“Heigh-dee heigh-dee hay!”

“Heigh-dee heigh-dee hay!”

“By the gods, what a feeling of power!” Lenna said to herself,
then started forward again through the middle of the colony. “Take it,
maestro!”

“Hey heigh-dee heigh-dee, heigh-dee hay a gopher hole!” Bill
roared in a deep, gravelly voice as he followed, his massive hull seeming to
sway in time with the rhythm. He was a machine of many unique talents, but
music was not one of them.

The first hint Lenna had that they were anywhere near the base was when the
small patrol ship came over the top of the hill to their left, moving quickly
to intercept them. She recognized the ship immediately as a hover tank, a
fairly standard type used by the Union in rugged terrain, part attack craft
with powerful weapons and part transport. It could fly like a real aircraft for
covering rough ground, although it usually hovered just over the surface on a
form of field drive to save power. It could even float, although such a
function was of little use in this place.

The tank settled to the ice a short distance away and the main hatch opened,
dropping down to form a boarding ramp. Lenna waited patiently while a pair of
soldiers in environmental suits like her own stepped out.

“What are you doing out here?” the apparent leader of the pair
asked. At least he asked in the calm, almost bored voice of someone who
expected a perfectly reasonable answer. After all, Lenna was dressed as one of
their own and walking about this disgruntled countryside with a sentry. She
relaxed.

“Performing cold-weather exercises on this experimental model,”
she explained, indicating Bill. He bent one foreleg and nodded. “We were
flying along when something came up behind us in a hurry and blasted us
good.”

“Must have been that rebel freighter that made that laughable pass at
the base three days ago,” the second of the two offered.

“I imagine so, considering the fact that you’ve been walking due
west along its approach,” the first one agreed. “Why don’t we
give you a ride in, as much as that might seem like better late than
never.”

“How far are we from the base?” Lenna asked as she directed Bill
into the rear portion of the tank.

“Oh, it’s just over that next hill, not more than a kilometer
away.”

There was certainly something to be said about being delivered to the front
door, although she was just as glad that they had not found her before this. As
it was, it seemed likely that she would be allowed to simply disappear inside
the base as soon as they arrived. Otherwise, after finding her in the middle of
the frozen nowhere, there would have been too much time to wonder about her,
perhaps even to test her identity to greater depth than her forged idents could
endure.

The base was sprawled across the icefield that filled the wide, circular
depression of a valley that appeared to be the better part of fifty kilometers
across, although only the tops of a few mostly-buried buildings broke through
the surface of the snow in widely-scattered clumps. Very little information
existed about this base, and no photographs. Lenna was not surprised to find
that the largest part of the complex was actually deep underground, in the zone
of constant temperatures and therefore sheltered from the deadly cold of the
winter storms.

The tank cut a straight path across the ice to the nearest of many long,
featureless buildings. The massive metal door opened at their approach,
revealing a long, steep ramp descending into the depths. Lenna watched with
interest as they descended beneath the relatively thin lens of ice that filled
the shallow, valley floor, down within the rock itself. Even the Union knew
better than to build something that might be expected to last for centuries in
the ice itself, which had a disconcerting habit of moving and cracking, as well
as simply accumulating and then disappearing altogether over long periods of
time.

They arrived at last in a type of underground garage, where some two dozen
hover tanks were parked, with empty stalls for several more. The ceiling seemed
a little low, at least to Lenna. She thought that she would have felt just a
little nervous in trying to guide a tank through this enclosed space, since the
machines had no wheels and were obliged to float about a meter off the ground.
There seemed to be about three meters of clearance over the roofs of the parked
tanks. Considering how massive they were, that was cutting it just a little close.

Her own tank settled to the floor and the main hatch began to fold down,
although the two soldiers remained seated in the forward cabin. The leader
turned to look at her.

“This is patrol depot three,” he explained briefly. “We
have to go back out on duty, so we’ll just let you out here. The tram
station is through that passage on the far side of the chamber.”

“We’re on the eastern perimeter?” Lenna asked, sending
Bill on through the narrow hatch.

He nodded. “This is the main complex, of course. Hangars for the
supply ships and the mock wolves are on the far side of the western
ridge.”

Lenna was so surprised by that unexpected lead that she almost forgot to
tender the appropriate thanks and farewells as she followed Bill out the hatch.
The tank rose and moved away, accelerating up the long ramp back to the
surface. Lenna hardly even noticed as she walked absently across the garage
toward the tram station, while Bill followed loyally behind.

Things seemed to be going about as well as she had any right to expect.
First she was delivered right inside the base itself, without the need to bluff
her way through security, and then she was given the lead she needed to begin
her search. Apparently the vague hints were perfectly true. The Union was
developing a new form of missile or automated fighter that employed highspeed
artificial intelligence to outfly the Starwolves, a highly advanced
variant of the old Wolfhound missiles that had been used to limited effect in
the past.

“Get a move on,” Bill told her softly. “You might attract
attention to yourself, shuffling about like that.”

“All right. You just keep your shell on,” Lenna answered softly.
“What’s your problem? You have a short in your patience
chip?”

“What do we do now?” he asked, his usual practical and unperturbed
self.

“Now we establish our cover,” she said, directing Bill into the
first of the two compartments of the tram. “First we turn up the
personnel sections and requisition ourselves an apartment where I can leave
this arctic gear, and then we begin having a look about. If things continue
to... Hello!”

“Hello,” Bill answered pleasantly.

“Oh, debug yourself!” Lenna snapped, waving him away
impatiently. She had been bent over the control panel in the front of the
compartment, where the operator could select from between some three dozen tram
routes. There was a very extensive map of both the passenger and heavier cargo
tram routes. “Why, just look at this map. This place must be as large as
a city. And a fairly large city, at that.”

“Many places to look,” Bill remarked innocently.

Maeken Kea stood at the window of the observation deck, watching the loading
of the cutter that would take her back to Vannkarn. The ship looked small and
lonely in the immense, underground bay now that the fleet was under way, just
as this entire complex seemed silent and empty now that its primary function
was done. She wanted out of here, but she did not want to go home. She wanted
to be out with her fleet, at the command of a swift, powerful ship. Even a
Fortress would do, for all that she seemed to have bad luck with the monsters.

Donalt Trace stood a short distance behind her, leaning back with crossed
arms against the table that rested against the inner wall. He was a towering
man, as big as she was small, a stately, ruggedly handsome man with streaks of
white in his hair and a regal face lined by years of care and reconstructive
surgery. They were both growing old in the pursuit of his schemes.

“It’s just not fair,” she insisted, turning to face him.
“We’ve worked on this for years. Twenty years of planning all
coming together at the same time, hitting the Starwolves in more ways than they
can possibly handle. Next to you, I’ve done more than anyone else to make
this happen. I want to be a part of it.”

Trace shook his head slowly, perhaps even sadly. Maeken expected no
concessions from this man, not even for her. Obsessed men were supposed to be
cold and uncaring, to use others as they used themselves. Most people assumed
that Donalt Trace was a man obsessed with the destruction of the Starwolves, a
certain Starwolf named Velmeran in particular. But Maeken thought that she knew
him better. Fighting Starwolves was simply his job, and he took it very
seriously.