The Starwatchers

by Steve Johnson

Part One

June 2001
14,000 words

It's not Kir Nuwin's fault. None of it. I know everyone thinks differently by now, after the court of inquiry; even school kids learn to blame Kir for what happened. But you can blame him, or Thark, or Glory, or Willie Three-Nine, or the techs who programmed him or the inventor of the repeating plasma coil or the Lord God Jehovah or the thing he let the Rocks make out there on the Rim where no one goes. Blame any one of them if you want, and you're just as right as if you blamed Kir like everyone else. At the end of the day, it's the man who gives the orders who takes the responsibility, and on the day in question, that was me.

**

It’s coming. It can’t wait any longer, down in the dark under the heavy burden of mud and earth, no clean stars to see by, no air to breathe. It’s crawling up toward the sky, breaking through with pulpy claws, spreading its massive arms to scoop the muck away from its clotted mane and huge underslung jaws, coming for the children.

**

I dug into the mud with both hands, tunneling out into the swamp while pushing with my boots to get clear of the skiff. I was head-down, which meant gravity was helping me get out, but it also mean my head got to be under water longer than any other part of me. I came up, kneeling in a meter of muck, and breathed out slowly but forcefully to clear the mud from my nostrils before taking that first, heady breath of clean air.

I pressed a palm to my scalp and scraped a kilo of muck from the three-day stubble on my head. I glanced around – there was no movement visible, except the waving of reeds in the breeze, which smelled of minerals, algae, decaying wood and, far away, smoke and metals. It was wine from Heaven’s own cellar after three days in the skiff.

Speaking of which, I still needed the faithful steed, even though it would never fly again. Prolonged orbital entry had stripped the ablative matter from the upper and lower surfaces and worn the stiff, skinny wings down to nubs. I souvenired a dry bag and a couple of pressure containers from inside, under where my arms had been, and kitted up. Its job done, the skiff teetered over and fell apart into sections, helped along by a shove from me.

I snapped together an x-ray link rifle and felt better immediately. Dad used to point to a picture in the den when we had visitors over; it showed a grinning Starwatch trooper in wet-world camouflage, covered from head to foot in so many reeds, stems, mud and bugs that he looked like an overinflated mud balloon, holding his gleaming weapon up in one hand. Dad would ask them how you could tell, just from the picture, that this guy was an elite soldier.

Most of them didn’t get it – I didn’t, at first. They mentioned his physique, his grin, the lines of his clothing, even the fact that he had obviously been in the swamp for days and still looked raring to go. But that wasn’t what Dad meant. We’re so used to television heroes coming out of a burning building with their hair perfectly in place that it took a moment to realize that this guy looked like he crawled through a pigpen on his belly, but his weapon was spotlessly clean.

Every time I hefted a clean, boresighted weapon on a new world, especially one where we inserted like this, it made me feel like I’d passed a test all over again.

My cerb came out next, in working order, if not too happy about re-entry. Software likes predictability, and the currents of upper atmosphere at decimal Mach are anything but. He was probably annoyed with how far we’d landed from target, and no amount of “expect the unexpected” was going to change that. To a machine, that old chestnut was semantically null.

I was working with Willie again, a cerb who’d been around the Watch a good long while. Nice guy. I got him up on my shoulders and linked up. As expected, he was in the middle of a loop of test gripes to see if I was there.

-- We are 7400 meters off target, --- he said. --- Search right bearing 099. ---

“And good evening to you too, Willie. Searching. Seven klicks isn’t so bad, when you consider …”

-- 7400 meters is 8 minutes 12 seconds at walking speed. Assembly in 30 minutes now extremely improbable. --

Just like a regular guy, he was. Even interrupted his own partner in midsentence. True, I wasn’t saying anything important, but to know that from context … well, as I said, Willie’d been around a while.

I shook my head, making the cable wobble between my headset and his input port, and he complained about that, the details passing right through one lobe of my mind and out the other. I’ve never been married, what with the war on, but I understand some of my married buds find their mates’ chatter a soothing background hum, conveying nothing more than “All’s well. I got your back,” and never hearing the words. It’s kinda like that, I guess.

The gear was all unpacked and hung about my frame, clamped to every bolt and loop in my armor’s surface and some jerry-rigs of wire and cloth special-made for missions like this, where there’s no resupply for days and you’re up against the enemy’s varsity. I didn’t see anything at all off to the east, told Willie, and headed off at a trot. He told me everything about the terrain, mission and status as we jogged, taking it in from passive sensors only, but it was a lot less, and more focused, than some cerbs I’d worked with. He was filtering the data for relevance, which meant this ten-kilo hunk of crystal and metal had some idea what it was like to be a combat infantryman.

And they say it’s an age without miracles.

I said there was no movement visible, and that was good, because a Starwatcher who comes in too close to his buddies is just painting “SHOOT ME” over both their heads in letters a meter high. Dispersion was drilled into us from day one. If the enemy spotted a Starwatcher on a hill, and took him out, there were supposed to be guys on either side, down in that gully or up in that tree a mile away, who would carry on and get some payback for him. Miles were the only armor light enough for us to carry down from the sky.

Too many miles between us, though, and the Watch might not be able to complete the mission. We’d still raise all kinds of hell off on our own, just not the particular kind of hell we were supposed to be raising tonight. Which was my only concern at the moment, because it looked like I, and by extension my team, had gotten down without anyone seeing us.

It usually happens that way, but you never count on it.

Our mission was as old as the stone axe: we were to find the base or ship from which raids were launched in this sector and wipe out said raiding craft and every Xiroci capable of bearing arms. Willie didn’t have a jeep scope, of course, because we don’t have satellites around this world (the war would have had to be going a whole hell of a lot better for that to be the case) so he couldn’t see over the horizon, nor look down to find our buddies, or even confirm exactly where we were. But I’d seen the outlines of this region when I buzzed over it at just under the speed of sound, guided my skiff down until the last frantic seconds when Willie took over to take her in, and of course I had the map memorized in detail. So I was pretty sure that, barring new evidence, the Xiroci refueling base was up ahead where the smells of machinery were coming from, far away enough that I wouldn’t know it if I weren’t downwind. Willie didn’t have a sense of smell, but he was pretty sure I was right.

Having oriented on the target, I moved perpendicular to it for a while, holding my pace down to the speed of the swaying reeds. Willie ID’d Kir, my squad leader, just as I spotted a lump that might have merited a second look. He held up a hand.

Light-enhancing visors can do a lot with starlight, even in a sky as empty as this. A big arc halfway to the zenith held a few blue dots and a scattering of white blurs, but apart from that, it was black as the inside of a boot. Little smudges were other galaxies, impossibly far away, invisible until you came far enough out here in the Fringe that the stars didn’t wash them out.

Kir made signs – “Spotted. Two. Friendly. That way,” meaning he had contact with two more of the team. We were supposed to roll up on the center, with my fireteam moving right on touchdown, Lasko’s to the left, and Glory staying put in the middle. If a man overshot or was missing, we’d just keep going and eventually run into each other.

-- Probably Winter and Thark, -- said Willie, though I already knew that. Who the hell else would it be?

I signed back, “Wait Here, Question?” Ted was still on my left and if we waited for him to join us, we’d be three instead of two in case of trouble.

“Affirm,” came the gesture, and he sank down into the reeds.

We went back to back, with me looking left for Ted and Kir on the right. Our cerbs established contact with their short-range lasers, impossible to overhear, and started talking to each other at machine speed while keeping a few hundred eyes on the perimeter.

We walkers weren’t idle; our visors help concentrate your peripheral vision into your forward arc, so two men can scan a whole 360-degree circle. But it takes getting used to. You can’t aim by what you see unless your target’s right in front of you. I would have turned my squeeze circuit off if we weren’t on hostile soil, with enemy potentially in any direction at all. Since we were …

There was Ted, or an enemy who trained and dressed a hell of a lot like the Star Watch. Turned out it was Ted. He didn’t look like the Creature from the Bracken Bog the way I did, which meant he’d set down in something a little drier than a swamp. Luck, maybe, or a damn good cerb pilot. Or maybe he exercised a little more fine control on the final approach than we mere mortals. Ever since we were kids, he’s been just a little too good to be true. If Ted ever drew attention to the perfect film-star way he did everything, he’d be unbearable.

We palavered in hand signals and he fell in at the very limit of passive visibility behind Kir, ahead of me. I was tail watcher because Ted was carrying the star radio, a big hunk of weight even without the extra batteries all of us humped in sealed containers. Without it (or the backup Lasko was lumbered with) we couldn’t call for extraction, and we couldn’t very well walk home unless we learned to walk straight up.

Then, too, if we got the information we were after but died trying, the message would still get through and accomplish the mission, as long as we had the radio. In that sense, it was more important than we were.

Kir passed the signal down the line that he’d found Winter and Thark, who had made rendezvous with one another. So where was Glory? We should have found her by now, if she’d landed correctly. All of us had been too busy landing our own selves to see her go in, of course, but she seemed okay right at the last, before we hit dirt.

That made Kir patrol commander until we located Lasko, which we did soon after. It was still full dark, and this planet was big for its gee, so we had plenty of darkness left, but I didn’t think we could make the base before first light. Probably we’d tab it hard until an hour or so before light and hide up till it got dark again. Long nights mean long days – we’d be in that hide a while, but at least we were out of the stinking skiffs.

And that was just what we did, except that Kir detailed me to stay there and look for Glory in a circular search, breaking off after three hours to catch up with the patrol. They’d fort up earlier than usual, so I could make the distance if I really pushed it and we could have a proper defensive arc ready by dawn. It sounded good to me – I didn’t want to go in a man short either, and for all we knew, Glory might need medical attention as well as being late. Hate to leave a trooper in those circumstances, always assuming you don’t have to.

And yes, it made a bloody difference she was my big sister – I’m not made of stone.

**************************************************

It stalked across the land. No hillock, no clump of weeds or rivulet was safe from its attention. Two heads sprouted from its trunk, one sweeping the ground endlessly with its wide, wet eyes, setting everything ablaze with its intensity. The other was cold and dry, flickering pale bolts in all directions, turning the world into a gray reflection. The heads whispered to each other, each doing what the other commanded, and the whispers grew and multiplied as more and more of them arose from the mud.

They wafted through the night, down low to the ground where the water and the plants were thickest. They swayed, calling to each other in their language of rasps and hisses. And they came slow, slower than a falling stone, and no one, no one saw them. They would be among us soon, picking and choosing, taking the tenderest of our brothers and our sisters for their own, and we could do nothing to save ourselves unless we could find them in the swamp.

**************************************************

I didn’t find Glory’s skiff, but I wasn’t supposed to – those things break down into tiny particles which get absorbed into the soil. They never do it before they’re supposed to, either, despite the horror stories you may have heard. If a skiff (it stands for Starwatch Combat Insertion Float, in case you’re curious) ever falls apart in midair, it’s because an enemy beam or pellet helped it along, which happens more often than I like to think about.

Anyway, I had a feeling someone had been moving around here recently – if it wasn’t local wildlife, about which we knew zip – so I kept looking as the deadline drew near, and spent a lot of time squatting in one position, scanning the horizon for the contrast a moving man would make with the skyline.

That’s where I was when the roof fell in.

I spotted a couple of stars being occluded and thought, “Finally, what kept you?” before I realized they were too high in the sky to be blocked by a standing man. Willie hadn’t even bleeped. And the flying thing was moving fast, fast enough to be overhead in a few seconds and gone in a few more. Well, we were here to search for a tender ship refueling fighter craft – it wouldn’t surprise me a bit that they used some fighters for patrol.

Overhead concealment is vital in combat. Overhead electronic cover, to hide our warm bodies, metal objects and electronics, is even more vital, but requires equipment too heavy to be man-portable. So we do without, and every so often it catches up with us.

This time it caught up with the rest of the patrol instead of me. I was off to one side of the fighter – pure bloody luck – but they were right under it, and something tripped its sensors to their existence. The fighter lit up a strobing bank of plasma discharges into the swamp, ripping it apart in balls of exploding steam that walked across the team’s position and into the water beyond. One of those bolts hit something metallic and made a bigger flash than the others, scattering burning bits everywhere. It was coming around for another pass when my link grenade punched a hole right forward of the engine, and the pieces of the fighter, torn clean in half, slammed into the ground with a concussion that slapped my boots from all those miles away.

Willie wanted to give it another, right where his red crosshairs estimated the pilot was, but I didn’t. We could still salvage some concealment if we got this contact over with quick.

In training, they yell at you all the time to make you do things you don’t want to do. We figure at the time that’s because these instructors joined the military just for the chance they’d get to yell at people and make them obey, and I’m not saying that doesn’t happen, but the idea is not to subsidize bullies; it’s to make it second nature for you to do what you’re supposed to, not what you feel like doing, especially when what you feel like doing is curling up in a ball and screaming.

Glory, wherever she was, was on her own for now. I trotted toward the wreck, crouching every so often to scan for aircraft, though nowhere near as often as I should have. Hell, we already knew they were there; my whole team, for all I knew, had just been blasted apart by something that shouldn’t even have existed.

***

Single-seat space fighters never made a whole lot of sense to me.

Back in the mechanical age, there were these things called airplanes, and they went one hell of a lot faster than ocean ships. Ten, twenty times faster, in fact. Anti-aircraft wasn’t real good, then, either, so a plane could zip in, dodge some flak, drop a bomb on a ship and zip away again, and there wasn’t a whole lot the ship could do about it. Most of the planes missed, and a lot of them died, but come on – if I get to shoot at you from across the room, and you can slap some of the bullets down but you never get a chance to shoot back, well, sooner or later I’m going to get you.

Airplanes had it all their own way for a long time. There was a limit to how big a plane could be and still fly, so the best fighter planes were one-seaters, like a sportscar. And there was a special breed of man, and later woman, called the fighter pilot, who mastered the deadly arts of aerial combat and became the gladiators and tribal champions of twentieth and twenty-first century war.

In space, there’s no limit to how big a ship can be. Sure, the small ones spin faster; they have less moment of inertia. But they don’t change their course any faster than a big battlewagon; changing course depends on the ratio of engine to ship size, and there’s no reason you couldn’t have a continental siege platform that was 80 percent engines, any more than a one-seater with 80 percent engines, if you wanted to. You aim at a ship’s course; so long as the ship’s there to be hit when your beam arrives, you don’t particularly care which way its nose is pointed.

Little ships are harder to hit. Granted. But the distances over which a beam weapon can puncture a pressure hull are so great that the little ship is in range for hours before it gets away. Give anyone hours to hit a target, no matter how small and quick, and I wouldn’t want to be sitting inside that target.

Plus, there’s a limit to how thick your pressure hull can be if your ship is just big enough for one man. Burning through those things doesn’t take hardly a flick of one of the big beams our dreadnoughts carry; often they slice all the way through, sawing it in half, before the beam can even turn its attention elsewhere. And if you put a stardrive on a ship, it’s got to mass thirty percent of the total, at least. Fifty percent for power and fuel, thirty percent for all those weapons, twenty percent for the sketchiest lifesystem and, whoa – you’re over budget at 130% already. A ship can’t be 130 percent ANYTHING.

So that’s why we called the Xiroc fighters Bumblebees. We knew the name they used in their language, same way we knew their numbers and letters: from spies, mostly. But we called ‘em Bumbles because a bumblebee really shouldn’t be able to fly. Its mass is too great for the area and strength of its wings; simple geometry. Everyone knows that.

But the bumblebee doesn’t know it’s impossible, so it flies anyway.

And if you like, actually like, living in a cockpit, eating through a pap tube and using a relief tube on the other end, breathing the same gallon of air over and over and over again till it’s as much a part of you as your eyes, moving your arms and legs just as much as you need to for control, wandering among the stars for days or weeks without seeing another artificial object, let alone the sound of a human voice … if, instead of putting up with all that the way we do, you think that’s right and normal and The Only Decent Way to Live … well, then, you’re a Xiroc. And you’re likely to be one hell of a fighter pilot.

That’s why space fighters made sense … to them. What the core worlds desperately needed now was to find out how they did it.

Because even if you’re biologically adapted to regard the seat of a fighter as your natural habitat, you can’t fly forever without fuel. These guys were getting their energy from somewhere, and they didn’t maintain real bases as we think of them, so they had to have some kind of mobile refueling system, like a mobile hangar, or a ship that was also a base. Like the carriers of olden times.

We’d lost a lot of men, wasted a lot of money and time, but we now had some pictures of their carrier ships. Big mothers, bigger than a battlewagon, with three levels like three spaceports stacked on top of each other, open to space all the way around except in back where the engines were. And hundreds, maybe thousands, of fighters crowded in and around those open spaces, floating, flying, refueling. We didn’t know how many of them they had, but the Rim is big, bigger than the Cygnus Arm, even if the stars aren’t packed so close together. We’ve got close to a dozen system-class battlewagons already, and could have a hundred if we really ramped up for war, though it might take us a few years. The Xiroci seemed to take war pretty seriously. Did they have a hundred carriers already? Could they, if they wanted to?

We didn’t know. This raid probably wouldn’t tell us, either. We knew they had a carrier in this system, and there was only one open-air planet in it. So we were going to go down, find the carrier, and blow it to hell and gone. Just another raid.

We raid and we raid and we raid. We learned it from the Xiroc, but they raid as a way of life. Since they came blasting out of the Rim down onto the civilized worlds, we’ve had to learn a lot of things that the Xiroc do better. Man for man, I think our SkyWatch guys are worth two or three of them. At least, you don’t see Xiroc sending parties of seven men on important missions.

Which means that when we meet up, it’s usually seven of us against fifty of them.

They use one-man fighters, as I said. All different makes and models, some centuries old. The most prominent in their social hierarchy get the best mounts, with the young, the old and the weak flying the junkers.

A little like us, I guess. The best of the best get skiffs, suits of flying armor that are a lot like one-man fighter craft, except we have arms and legs and no stardrive, so we have to operate from very stealthy carrier vessels and make it back before our air and power run out. It’s a lot easier to recycle air than power, so your suit will go dead long before you get light-headed. If you’re heading home anyway, and the carrier sees you, you can float right into the retrieval netting without so much as a volt to your name. It’s happened before.

Of course, it’s been known to fail, too.

We need to know where the Xiroci are, and visual tracking’s worse than useless over interstellar distances; you get a pretty good idea where they were a decade ago, but that doesn’t help you predict where they are now. And there’s no way to track a ship in hyperdrive until you’re right on top of it, of course; drive ripples disappear mighty quick in this noisy Galaxy of ours. Except at close range, there’s no such thing as a “stealthy” spaceship.

We, on the other hand, are as quiet as can be. We line up on a bearing, burn hard and fast, then coast for sixty hours or more through the system, disking everything we see. Do it right and you’ve plenty of juice to burn getting home. Or we insert off a carrier that lends us its vector, coasting in with full batteries at damn near missile velocity, and hit a target before he knows we’re there. Burn all our fuel and rendezvous with the carrier as it swings around to pick us up, or a second carrier that’s been waiting for weeks for us to show.

We’re damn good at it. Space is like our second home, as comfortable as the trees were to our ape-man ancestors. We operate on the very limit of human endurance, day in and day out – when we aren’t raiding, we’re practicing to raid. We hold our breath better than Malay pearl divers, hit our marks better than Israeli fighter jocks. We’re Starwatch, and most of our rep is simple truth.

But the next guy to call us The Men With Blue Faces gets a punch in the snoot. Anoxia’s no joke.

******

I was running for the ambush site at the same time as I was scanning the entire dome of the sky for more fighters, and if you think that’s impossible, you’re very nearly right. I didn’t do a very neat job of antiaircraft overwatch, but on the other hand, I did a pretty good job of running. Willie was on it anyhow, telling me endlessly about a lot of different sectors of sky and how empty they were. Never say AIs don’t learn from experience!

There wasn’t any sign of Lasko. Winter and Ted were down, burned and torn by fragments, which threw me for a minute until I saw the vein of rock, a foot below the surface until the plasma bolt excavated the earth above and shattered it into splinters in the same split-second. I tried to check their vitals while still scanning the sky, saw Kir swiveling his head and rifle barrel a few jumps away, and forgot about the overhead for a minute. Kir had it covered.

Winter was moving, trying to sit up, but a piece of her armor was crimped over her hip. I cut it away and checked her, trusting Willie to watch my back, then turned to Ted when it was obvious Winter wasn’t dying. Ted had caught a very near flash on his left backside, but all the gear he was carrying absorbed the energy so that he wasn’t really hurt, just scalded a little from where two gallon water bottles had exploded into steam along his thigh. Much of his gear was ruined, of course, and his cerb was giving funny signals as it struggled to do a self-check but kept restarting. I let Willie have an electronic look, and within seconds, he’d written it off.

-- Active but not taskable. Repairable. Shut down and bring with us. –

The cerb’s housing was half seared away, but it looked like his serial was NRE something-something. Probably named Henry. We’d take him along, of course. He was a citizen as much as any of us, and it’s a lot easier to repair AIs than people. If we lost another man, and couldn’t carry the load, well, the mission came first, but we weren’t there yet.

We found Lasko upside down a dozen meters away, half buried in mud that had been thrown up over him by shock waves. He was sour about it, but that just meant he was normal, and he assumed command when Kir prompted him. Thark broke telepathic silence to give me a pop, telling me where he was, and I waited for Kir to tell him to button it, but of course he didn’t. Willie obligingly turned down the volume on my telepathic implant; I was getting a high tinkling noise through it, which was how my brain interpreted a series of clicks and pops transmitted into my auditory nerve. Willie got it too, of course, but there wasn’t any such thing as a telepathic antenna, so he had to get it through a wire from my TI to him. I guess in a sense, my brain and spinal cord were Willie’s antenna.

That tinkling noise made me look around -- it was nothing I’d ever heard before, and Willie didn’t have it on file -- but we couldn't afford to ponder that problem just now. With Glory missing, we were down to six men, and without our best psycher. Kir was psychically sensitive, and the rest of us had telepathic implants, of course, but if the enemy had a bag of telepathic tricks we were going to be pretty well defenseless against them. It hardly ever happens, but you hear stories of squads who shot off all their ammo at psychic phantoms, or developed raging hatred of one another at a psycher's urging.

It wasn't good, but we had only so much darkness left and a lot of ground to cover. If we found the carrier early, I could afford to send someone back to look for her.

We moved out, fast, away from the ambush site. Six men and five cerbs left, against a planet armed with everything up to and including at least one starship.

Except for pops to establish identity and location, we kept mental silence as far as possible. For hulks like Lasko and Thark, that wasn't a strain, but Kir's rabbitty mind was always thinking about a dozen things at once, so he had to keep his implant switched off or he'd wake the whole neighborhood. Once we had each other spotted, though, we could use night-vision scopes to see each other's hands, and talk by signing. It was slow, but safe, with no emissions other than ambient light.

Thark wasn't happy with his weapon, a heavy infinite repeater meant for firing from a tripod or a vehicle mount. Its flash suppressor was loose, and all the turning and fiddling in the world wasn't making it sit right. If Thark's massive paws couldn't screw it back on, nothing short of a power wrench was going to do the job; he took it off and stowed the suppressor in his kit. But that meant we didn't want him in lead-off position, where any shot he fired was going to light up the world.

The same applied to us linkers, of course, whose grenades made holy havoc on command. We kicked it around and Lasko decided I'd pissed off more of us than anyone else lately; he awarded me the point position, with the promise of a medal if some Xiroc saw me first. I gave him some lip, or more accurately some finger, and off we went. The Watch followed in squad order, except Thark hung back at drag instead of Kir.

We plugged our goggles into our cerbs’ arrays; magnified vision shrinks the field, so you get a great close-up of whatever's dead ahead but nothing on something a degree left or right. The goggles spread the image across our eyes, correcting for edge effects and making it look as though we were a kilometer or more in front of where we actually were. It's weird at first, but you get used to anything in time. I rationalized that I was looking around through a camera mounted on a kilometer-long invisible pole sticking out over my head; to us monkey folk who just climbed down from the trees a week ago in cosmic terms, that made a lot more emotional sense than the truth.

After a couple hours, Lasko relieved me at point.

“You ready to slack?” he asked in that Slovak drawl, all in one breath.

“Fuckin’ A, Bubba,” I said, just to emphasize my command of Navy patois.

Because we were all in visual contact, (except Ted, half-blind with unaided senses) we could have one man on each wing instead of two, which put our main strength in the center. Of course, with six men, that was two in the middle vs. one in front, behind and to either side; not as much of a main body as I'd like. But the more men you send, the easier it is for the enemy to spot 'em.

As it happened, we sent the right number this time. Lasko made a fist and we all went down, impersonating dirt. He didn't move further -- if he could see them, they could at least have a chance to see him -- but the fist was on his left side, held out ahead of his body and angled toward a hill in the middle distance. Our cerbs were giving us identical overlays at the moment, bet on it – the hill was outlined in red and enhanced, with attention symbols flickering over the low ground on either side.

I scanned it -- metal glinted from a shadow that wasn't as wide as it had been at early evening. All the squad was visible from my position; even Thark, because the night-sight has two lenses, front and back, and the rear one was feeding to my goggles just like the front. I had to blink hard, tripping the laser that kept watch on the corner of my eye, to switch displays, but there he was. Which meant we didn't have to break psi silence.

So we sat there in the dirt, feeling our armor cool and the moisture settle, while we waited for the sentry to do something. People always have their sentries moving around, maybe to keep them awake, when it makes much more sense to have them hidden in one spot where the enemy can't see them. It's the same with every alien race I've seen, too -- something about armies seems to breed makework like some natural law of bureaucracy. So after a while, I was pretty sure he hadn't seen us.

I could have risked a laser pulse, but instead I blinked a different way and cleared my goggles. I was seeing raw nightlight now, which was to say I wasn't seeing very much of anything, and Lasko could see my eyes, too. I made some eye-signs, blinking left and right, and he let his barrel rise a few centimeters and covered the sentry position. Then Thark started backing up, without a word from me -- we know our jobs -- to cover the squad as we withdrew, last man first, until I had the sentry covered and Lasko could start backwards. He moved very slowly indeed, while I watched the sentry through my scope.

It moved.

I almost put a grenade through it right then, but it moved and then stopped, the shiny shape changing slightly as the moonlight's angle shifted. I still couldn't tell what I was looking at -- the surface facing me was probably rounded, as I hadn't seen an edge or corner, but that didn't help. Lasko moved past me in glacial slow-motion, and the sentry shifted again, but still nothing happened. I had radio, x-band and TI up to max, but it didn't make a peep.

Finally, he was past and I could start pulling back myself. We made contact again after about an hour of angle-off backtracking and headed north again on a different bearing, meant to go wide around the sighting. I joined Lasko as a second point, away off to his right, with Ted as the sole member of the main body.

***************************

There! It drifts past the sentinels, rousing them in their sodden sleep, but not enough to wake them. They are very close now. They’re almost in the same compartment, but you can’t see them. Something is moving around downstairs, and it’s brushing against your things in the dark, but you don’t dare get out of bed to look for it because it might, maybe, not yet know you’re there … unless it can already hear your labored breathing or the triphammer of your terrified hearts.

**************************

Tinkle-clink. There it was again. I strained into the darkness, but nothing was moving. I stopped, and stepped down my sensors one at a time. Sonic, radio and x-band didn't catch the noise, but when I turned down my TI the sound was much softer, almost inaudible.

Psychics, I thought. Just great.

If we'd misplaced our medic on landing, we'd have run into a virus field, sure as the stars, but no, we'd lost Glory, so naturally we were up against some kind of psycher bumpf. I didn't know if it was a telepathic sensor of some kind, a booby trap (or even if there were such a thing as a telepathic booby trap; WE don't have one, but the universe is full of races with their own favorite tricks) or some kind of communications. There wasn't a lot we could do except spread out further, and I didn't want to split the team. So we pressed ahead.

Lasko spotted something ahead and motioned us to freeze; this time we all got a good look at the target, and it looked like it might be worth our while.

A pair of geometric towers like extended pyramids stuck up at odd angles from the ground, clearly part of a much larger structure below ground level. We were in a low patch at that moment, looking slightly uphill, so it was probably in a pit or bowl rather than buried in the earth. Studying the ground, I made out ridges and bumps that might have been a power plant, or a starship's sensing grids. There was light coming up from the ground, greenish-yellow like the Xiroci sun.

Willie sketched possibilities to combine all the visible features. Some were extremely unlikely. But he was settling down around a truly massive vehicle, built around its star drive with the reactor far to rearward and podded payload, which might be anything at all, clustered toward the front.

I tapped Thark and Kir to make a circuit of the site and report back. That took an hour, while we laagered in open order, facing in all directions over our weapons and waiting for something to loom out of the night.

It did, too -- overhead. A trio of hot purple stars swept by, with a glimpse of the fighter they supported visible in their glow as it passed nearly overhead. The lights didn't approach the pit; they went away out, curved up, did some falling-leaf manuevers in the sky and then headed back the way they'd come. Another three-jet cluster made some similar loops in the sky away off to the east, across the bowl.

The Xiroci don't use trijets as first-line fighters any more, but they used to in my Dad's time. I made a model of one once, big and squat and ungainly as hell, but of course the model didn't have the power ratio of the real thing. Dad wasn't keen on letting kids get their hands on atomics.

In real life, the trijet was an overpowered design that really responded to a skilled pilot, although these guys hardly met that standard. It was easy to overcorrect in a trije, to pull into a vertical climb and then ram the ground at Mach 10 when you tried to pull out of it. In space, things weren't as bad until you got in close, and then you could break your neck trying to follow your target through a tight turn. That's if it was stationary -- if it was moving, forget it. They weren't dogfighters, they were strike ships, meant to build up vee to hit a fixed position and then punch out hard enough to outrun the ASE defenses, but definitely in that order. My simulator time on the Slayer, our version of the Bumblebee, had got me to the point where I could usually hit the target, but I couldn't count on getting out alive. Thark had taken to ramming the target, figuring he'd get a little more bang out of the experience, since he was going to die anyway.

These guys looked like devotees of the Thark school of bombing; it was a miracle they didn't knock the top off a mountain while they were cartwheeling around. Presently they went in and dropped vertically into the pit; two more came streaking up a little while later, separated, and started going through their paces.

It looked like we had our carrier. We each carried a pair of nukes, M1945 demolition devices like big fat grenades, sufficient to cut a battle cruiser in two. They're a lot like the ones the Navy uses, in fact. Only they throw them in handfuls of a hundred, because the trick isn't killing the battle cruiser once you hit it, it's hitting it in the first place.

The Xiroci, however, had obligingly parked their ship at the bottom of a gravity well, where the only thing we needed to do to match velocities was try not to fall off the ground.

Kir made the signal to come on into our little laager, with Thark behind. They'd gotten up to a place a little up the ridge from the pit, and confirmed it was a spaceship, albeit a strange one. It was round with three sections, like three disks stacked up, and each disk was ringed with launch ramps. If they wanted to, they could salvo all their fighters at once in all directions, although with their ship down in a hole like that they'd lose them all pretty quick.

He had film and data, and we moved to him one at a time to copy and store it to our own cerbs. Specs on the Xiroci carrier might prove more important in the long run than anything we did to this particular ship; if we knew their range and endurance, we could figure out patrol patterns that might help locate their home worlds.

They act like pirates, and I guess they are, but they're not criminal gangs; they come from a culture as advanced and coordinated as ours, just along different lines. We were in the position of Frenchmen knowing how to fight Viking raiders but not knowing the location or extent of Norway. If we knew what their ships were capable of, we could start checking possible locations off the list, and eventually move on their center and win the war.

Which wasn't to say this carrier wasn't a big, juicy target, or that we weren't going to pluck it.

We all fitted rocket handles to the lugs on the bottom of our nukes, turning them into standoff weapons. I figured we'd spread out, with the grenadiers thumping them from two different angles and the repeatermen holding their nukes in reserve to cover our escape. A link rifle can loft a nuke much further than its own rocket can; I didn't see any reason to get any closer than necessary, and with nukes, you don't have to.

We split up, with Ted and Thark going my way. That tinkling noise rattled my ear.

I checked my TI -- it was still turned way down. It didn't just sound loud -- it WAS louder. I gave Ted a look, and he gave me an "I dunno" shrug, while Thark kept his eyes on the night.

-- Enemy telepathic traffic excessive. Attempted sensing probable. Coordinated conference less probable. Psychic attack least probable. -–

They were trying to read our minds!

Lasko’s backpack pulsed a flickering orange to our cerbs. Willie’s laser shifted around behind my ear; he was talking to the rest of the squad cerbs. Jesus, if we didn’t get off the eight ball fast, we were going to be in a solar system of hurt ..

-- Action before enemy action imperative. Patrol leader confirms. Move out. --

Is it possible to love a sentient software system? I was up and running before Willie even flashed the green arrow on my faceplate.

We had to take it as a telepathic compromise; carrying on as though we were still covert could get us ambushed or worse. Fortunately there are procedures in place for what you do if a psyker's got your scent. Unfortunately, the carbon half of the patrol didn't care much for them.

This was a drill we’d all dreaded in training – letting the cerbs run the tactics while we did what they said. But nobody can read a cerb’s mind, not without a direct connection to their I/O ports. So when there was a chance the enemy could be scanning our thoughts (and without Glory, there damn well was such a chance), the cerbs could come up with a plan on their own and we could be sure the enemy wasn’t reading the playbook along with us.

It’s unnatural to follow orders like a machine, but hell, they had to do it for us every day. And they couldn’t tell us why we were making these moves without tipping the enemy. So being baffled as to why we were told to jump here, shoot there, lie here for seven seconds, was more than an unfortunate side effect. It was absolutely militarily necessary.

So I ran, dove, dropped, shot, rose, shot, ran, ducked, backtracked (!), knelt, shot, painted a target with my laser, loaded and fired dummy grenades, and on and on. Thark stitched a line of plasma bolts a step behind me, dazzling my vision. By definition, he didn’t know what he was doing, but somebody did.

Puppet drill went on for several terrifying minutes before I noticed we were closing on the lip of the crater. The first two aircraft exploded overhead at just that moment; the cerbs were using link grenades for air defense, because although it was harder to hit a flying target with a link than with a repeater, there wasn’t a bright neon rope of plasma showing you where the shooter was, either. Cerbs want to live, too.

I mounted a tilted slab of rock and lay belly-down over the edge. There was the ship, filling the crater to the walls, its rounded upper works covered with antennas, grids and aircraft. The ship had a solid-looking keel like a rounded bottom, fitting neatly into the crater like a plug in a drainpipe. You don't often see armor on starships, so that was odd, but then everything the Xiroci did showed that there were at least two ways to accomplish anything.

Now it was time for the repeaters, hosing ellipses of sunfire as fast as they could cycle into the fighters below. They didn’t even have to take off to wax us at this range, just tilt their noses up a bit and let us have the good news over open sights. Thark’s weapon, in particular, lit him like a green-white spotlight, turning the capacitors that ejected past his head into spinning diamonds. His cerb must not have minded making him the world’s biggest target, or else it was willing to sacrifice him, and itself, for the good of the mission.

Which we are all supposed to be, in theory, but it’s still a shock when somebody really means it.

Thark stopped, but not to change position, just to recharge. Infinite repeaters aren’t really infinite – they suck in air to superheat into plasma bolts, but they can run out of power eventually. They run off a flat-weave power matrix that weighs more than the gun itself, recharges from the sun and ambient heat, and can be changed out in seconds, though, so it hardly ever happens. You can shoot ‘em from a test stand and they’ll spit out blue bolts till the whole assembly glows toaster-wire orange, long past the time any gunner would have kept a hold on it. Lasko picked up the fire from another angle.

Willie told me to get up and run, so I did, and just as I raised my head a grenade burst over the upper decks. Sensor towers went everywhere, falling and breaking with wires snapping loose in all directions, which covered my wild charge to the crater edge and onto the carrier’s hull. There was a hinged plate covering something on the first main deck, now in the open position, and I landed on it hard enough to bobble myself slightly.

Willie wanted me to get under the hatch cover and go inside. I stuck my rifle barrel in first, to let the lens on the tip get a look around, and changed Willie’s mind in a nanosecond. There was the world’s supply of Xiroci inside, running and crawling every which way into and over machinery and each other like a jar of ants poured over an engine. There were fighters which couldn’t launch because of the crater wall, cradles of weapons slung from the ceiling with Xirocs snaking down their chains, tools and heaps of what looked like food piled here and there at random.

Willie fired off the rifle’s five-grenade magazine without bothering to inform me. I didn’t need his urgent green arrow to roll off the hatch cover and make for higher ground before the first of them exploded. The hull punched my feet hard enough to send me and Willie sprawling, then rolling down its rapidly steepening slope. I grabbed for a handhold on some sputtering antenna stumps, but if Kir hadn’t grabbed me by the ankle I guess I wouldn’t have got out of there.

Willie’s link to my rifle was starting to get annoying; he switched the laser to high-band and fired off a pulse when it happened to be pointed the way he wanted, severing another sensor mast. So I switched it off. Willie started telling me at very high volume why this was a bad idea: he’s faster than me, sees in all directions, doesn’t have glands pulling him six ways at once, yadda yadda. What he was really saying was, “Hey, who’s in charge here, anyway?” When an AI starts reacting like a human being, you can bet the thing he hates most is to be reminded that at the end of the day, I’ve got the hands and feet and all he has is a speaker.

“Let’s plant some charges and get the hell out of here,” said Kir in my ear, and it sounded like a plan to me. We legged it up the curve of the hull toward its axis, where there was a rising dome-shaped thing coming up out of the hull. Xirocs burst from it before it cleared the edge, climbing over each other to get to us, and we both popped grenades in among them at the same moment. I blinked hard to ride out the flash, but I didn’t see anything but smoke and bodies flying at us. Winter hosed them with plasma from a position halfway around where we came in, and the rest of them should have run for it.

But they didn’t. They kept coming, trying to cross a few yards of hot metal under repeater fire, and got cut down almost to a man. One of them got within a stride before I lasered him down, and another actually touched Kir’s helmet, then got blown backward by a grenade fired directly into his thorax.

It didn’t go off, of course; they’re spin-armed after a certain distance so you don’t blow yourself up. Kir waved his link rifle like a magic wand, letting his cerb fire whenever it slid across something useful. That should have kept the rest of their heads down inside their elevator or whatever it was, but it didn’t. One guy leaped up and came running right at us, limbs falling off literally left and right, until Winter nailed him.

Then Kir scrabbled at the back of his helmet with his free hand, falling to his hands and knees. Winter’s cover fire slacked off, then stopped altogether. A mob of Xirocs ran into my grenades, then I was out of ‘em and fortunately, they were out of guys. I tried to reload, check Kir, look around for Winter to see what was wrong with her and alert my squad mates all at the same time.

You can’t do two things right at once, let alone four. I fumbled a tube of grenades, losing them, and stumbled trying to reach Kir, going down on my face. I was probably lucky I didn’t fall off the ship altogether.

Kir had been trying to reach the input jack on his helmet. I yanked it out, cutting him off from his cerb, but that wasn’t it. His cerb, Harry I think its name was, spotlighted Kir’s TI jack with its scanning laser, and I switched that off, too.

It was like I switched Kir back on. He rolled up, shot some grenades to keep the Xirocs in the elevator busy, and sent a general call over the radio. Ted answered, nobody else, but the guys started calling in in a second or two, after their cerbs had shut off their telepathic implants for them.

“The hell?” I said, meaning to follow up with specifics.

“Loud, fucking hellacious psi noise,” he said. “Like a goddamn Geiger counter in Texas. It started when those guys came out of that tower,” he said, pointing to the elevator, “and just got worse.”

-- Coordinated psi noise means many psychers working together. Disrupt them and the noise ends. ---

“But what’s the noise FOR? Just to distract us?” I wanted to know.

“Like it fucking matters,” Kir said. “Harlan’s right – let’s all drop bombs and boogie before they get done. They can’t get ‘em all before they blow.”

“Fuckin’ A, boss. Let’s rock ‘em,” said Thark.

-- Psi noise modulating. Signal content increasing. Signal isolated – do you want direct feed, or text? –

“Text,” I said. I scroonched up the TI dial a tad, heard a buzzing roar that made me wince, killed it.

-- Text follows: Bob, is that you (question mark inferred) (imprecise thought including keywords baby, blood, brother, burn, hurt, fear, revenge) I’m on my way (period) –

And every Rock ever born was coming up out of the elevator, to get away from my big sister.

**

Glorianna Stennis -- Glory – peeked into the crater from a streambed along one eroded side. Her eyes confirmed what her telepathy had already told her. She ducked back quickly, but not quickly enough; one of the guards, the nervous one over by the chemical sheds, blinked his eyes. He looked down at his hand in amazement, then back up to Glory where she knelt.

She took hold of his mind again, but there were plenty of others around that she had to maintain in their trance as well. There wasn’t time to be subtle, nor force enough to be brutal.

So she grabbed the fear that coated the core of this Xiroc’s personality, and twisted hard.

He broke a sweat and recoiled, running blindly away from her. He ran headlong into another Xiroc, who scared him just as badly, and went off in a third direction like an alien billiard ball. His screams of terror echoed off the camp’s walls, its vehicles, the walls of the carrier looming over them, alerting no one.

Glory raced after him.

He was tangled in circuitry when she caught up to him, pulling handfuls of crystalline computing blocks out with each impassioned thrash of his arms and legs. There was dented casing spread over a wide arc; apparently he’d run smack into a computing core, and rather than go around, had tried to burrow through with his bare hands.

Now he was surrounded by color and solid heaviness. Glory stroked his memories, suggesting the cozy feeling of curling up beneath heavy covers. The Xiroc’s thrashing subsided to a rhythmic rocking back and forth, which allowed her to get in close and touch the bell of her psi-amp directly to his forehead.

SLEEP, she thought with the implacable force of the tide. ALL IS WELL.

He went limp in the wires, his mouth going slack.

Glory put her hands on her knees and fought to get her breath back.

Good thing he wasn’t a claustrophobe, she thought. And to look at this computer, that’s the only good thing about tonight …

Around her in the distant darkness, minds were stirring. She’d let her grip slacken; she reapplied pressure, tightening down by degrees until they were all serene once more.

So many troops, I haven’t got any juice left to look for the files. Hope they weren’t all stored in this box.

But she looked around anyway, opening files, activating terminals, mustering what concentration she could while convincing half a battalion of aggressive, intelligent men that nothing was out of the ordinary, and wasn’t it a rather boring evening?

It was like an important math test in a way; there was panic there, lurking just out of reach, but she had to keep it away, keep focused on the task at hand, and above all not let the fact that she was afraid, itself, scare her. That spiral could be frighteningly steep, with catastrophe at the bottom.

Especially surrounded by Xirocs, she thought. Their whole life is kill or be killed; fear is one of the two or three emotions they do really well. Broadcast on that level, and you’ll not only blow your cover, but wake up anybody who really IS asleep …

She found something. It was in Xirocese, of course, but the Xirocs hadn’t been such great shakes at computermaking even when they had a working empire of sorts. The software was last year’s standard from back in the Home Stars, with all the words translated into Xirocese but the buttons, bars, colors, pulldowns and everything else exactly the same.

Paydirt!

That might have been a bit much enthusiasm to project, but “joy at finding a well-working machine” ranked very low on the Xiroc emotional scale. It didn’t rouse anyone.

But something did. The Xirocs inside the carrier were panicking, first on the top level and then on the entire ship, as some bad news went around. It wasn’t the fighting on the deck – that had been going on for some minutes – but something else. What was it?

She probed, and was almost knocked senseless by a sudden chorus of telepathic noise. In hundreds of different tones and emphases, its semantic content was KILL THE INVADERS AT ANY COST!

And an undercurrent, like the voice in the head of a man shouting something he doesn’t understand, or believe:

Find the brain, find the brain, it’ll all be downhill from here if we can hit their brain and break their unity. Where is it? Keep looking …

The sender, whoever it was, thought the invading Starwatchers were a single entity with a single brain that could be knocked out. Glory snickered – they sure didn’t know much about humans, or human soldiers – but not loud, because it occurred to her suddenly that if the enemy was controlled by a powerful telepath, they might be looking for the telepathic “brain” controlling the humans – and that would be she, herself.

***

I was firing a weapon in each hand, so fast they were jamming from the heat that raised blisters through my armored gloves, and I still couldn’t keep all their heads down. If every Xiroc in the spiral arm wasn’t out there in visual range, they hadn’t left many out.

And all of a sudden it was over, they’d stopped coming up, and nobody was shooting at me. There wasn’t a lot left of the superstructure where I had gone to deck – stubs of burnt-off antennae, crushed grids, hatches seared shut, and a lot of warped hull plates like cardboard left in the rain.

Kir scuttled up to the elevator, dropped a grenade down it, and waved his arm at us before jumping in right on the blast’s heels. We scrambled after him, of course, but on the way I noted to Willie that we might just as well plant charges where we were and leg it. But no, that wasn’t part of the plan, he said. Crat.

Once inside (there was no further resistance at the elevator, which would never run again), we split up, just one Watcher and his cerb to a radial tunnel. The cerbs had some vague ideas about how the ship was laid out, or would be if they were designing it, and had formed their plan on that basis. When we hit an unexpected ladder, chute or doorway, the cerbs updated the plan accordingly. One good point was that being software, they had exactly, and I mean exactly, the same battle-planning procedures in mind, so the change one cerb made was the same another would have, in his place. They couldn’t communicate the changes to one another with any confidence inside an echoing metal structure, but as I’ve observed before, life isn’t perfect.

We went around in what seemed like aimless circles for a very long time. Times like this you have to trust your cerb implicitly, and get some idea of what he feels like strapped to your back, unable to change the course in which you haul him. If they feel, that is, a point on which I have strong opinions but little proof.

I was spidering up a diagonal shaft in response to a cry for help from Glory when the floor gave way and I fell into a solid mass of wriggling Xiroci. They scuttled, scrambled, crawled and chattered all over each other to get out of the way, which involved a lot of crawling over me, too.

I jerked back almost before Willie sent up the alarm – he didn’t like being touched much either – jumped hard, got hold of a strut and levered my legs up out of the crowd. One clingy fellow wouldn’t let go and I had to give him the boot. It wasn’t hard – these were little Rocks, less than a yard high counting the carapace. But they had a full complement of horns and tusk-thumbs, which was odd, as their young were supposed to be smooth-headed. I’d make a report when I got time.

Still, it was a whole roomful of kids with no adults. Nursery? Schoolroom? Or a bunker where the adults put their kids out of harm’s way? We were pretty near the exact center of the ship, a smart place to put noncombatants in a sky fight but not so hot with commandos crisscrossing all over the interior. I could have killed the lot of them with one grenade, but quite apart from what the confined blast would do to me, I wasn’t about to blow up a roomful of children, period.

If we really went after them, we could probably exterminate the Xiroci as a species. A lot of human history reads that way. But the urge to resist the bloody-handed ape within us is stronger than it used to be, at least for now. If they put us on the brink of extermination ourselves, well, that would be different.

Besides which, the half of our polity that’s cerb wouldn’t hear of it. They all vote, you know, every single one of ‘em, though not all the same way, fortunately. There are cerb political parties, factions, debates and personalities on every issue – even rallies, which I don’t get at all. There are plenty of cerbs against the war, for example. But they compartmentalize their jobs from their philosophies in a manner strange to us; for all I knew, maybe Willie was as antiwar as they came.

Does God care about his digital grandchildren? Does he guard them from harm?

Probably I was anthropomorphosizing the Rocks too much, because some adults came bursting up through a floor grid and starting sizzling everything in sight. I hit the deck and returned fire, and they went to ground, too – behind some of their kids. God grant we never fight a race of fluffy bunny-folk; we’d be cooing and chucking them under the chin even as they stuck the knife in us.

I’d hit one for sure, but there were a couple more popping up the paintwork in my general vicinity. The Rocks use microwave weapons; they make huge sparks when they hit metal, and they know we wear a lot of it. But they didn’t seem to know exactly where I was.

Willie’s reactions are faster than mine, so I turned my shoulder to let him shoot with a periscope gizmo he extended, while I worked around the perimeter of the room on hands and knees. He got a couple more and made the rest keep a respectful silence – there were more than I’d thought, at least six – by the time I found the right passageway and took it. Willie shot behind us, chipping green and pink blooms of vaporized metal from the bulkheads, but his shots were high, over the kids’ heads.

I found that obscurely comforting.

****************************

It’s here! The one that came up out of the muck, the one carrying the cold one on its back, it’s come and it’s here and it’s found me and it’ll kill us all. But it’s going to start with me, me alone, and nobody else will hear – wake up! Wake up before it’s too late!

*****************************

Glory, when I found her, was sieged in by every Rock in the world. They could only get at her one at a time, but seemed perfectly willing to keep trying forever, while their mates burned through a thick bulkhead behind her. I thumped the main group with a grenade to get their minds on higher matters, but I wasn’t going to be able to thin them out by myself. They knew I was here; no reason not to call for help. Which I did. If anyone heard me, they’d be on the way at once. But they wouldn’t acknowledge, any more than I had when Glory cried wolf. Which left me on my own.

Concussion spilled me onto hands and knees again; my grenade going up. We must have been near the ship’s keel, where the heavy supporting beams transmitted the shock instead of crumpling out of the way. I stuck a palm around the corner; a little mirror on my finger supported the data link to my rifle, but was shiny enough to show me no Bugs still standing.

In fact, they were all down, even the bunch burning through from the side, well out of blast range. And they stayed down. Some of them – no, most of them – had their fanged mouthparts, like thumbs with spikes on the ends, chattering like four little tusks drilling for oil in their toothy mouths, as though they were eating at super-speed. But none of them so much as budged a limb.

“Glory?” I said over the comms. “You do that?”

I got a sound that might have been a cough if an elephant were standing on her chest. I broke cover and hurried to her side.

Glory was on her back, clawing at her helmet – not her helmet release buckles, which are around the collar, but the actual composite armor of the helmet body. She was scrabbling backwards, scraping her cerb against the deck, trying to get away from the thing that filled the chamber beyond.

It was big and bulbous, swollen outward as though under pressure, brown and purple and yellow like the colors of a bruise. A wall of spines bristled from longitudinal ridges of bone, but the hide between was stretched basketball-tight, so thin I could see oblong organs shifting within. A trickle of thick green liquid oozed from an aperture just above eye level.

It had no hands, no legs, no mouth nor eyes, but it was alive. And it hated me.

Willie told me my TI had burnt out. Poof, just like that. I jacked him into Glory’s cerb, which I think was named Alice, and he gave me her medical readings. She was suffering from telepathic overload; her brain temperature was over forty-two Celsius. Unlike the rest of us, Glory had telepathic sensitivity above and beyond what the implant gave her. And unlike a TI, she couldn’t turn it off at will.

I touched the pulsating sac-thing between the spines. It shuddered, and Glory whimpered, her arms curling about her chest. I took my hand away.

“Willie. Is this thing the source of the psi static?”

Likely. It looks like a Xiroci base type with grossly enhanced psi functions. Perhaps an experimental species.

“Can it quit blasting her brain? Or does it just scream mental noise all the time, for no reason?”

Unknown. But killing it would silence the static. Unless it gives a death scream, as some telepathic species have been known to do. In which case, Glorianna might die.

Damn it. I didn’t have a military reason to kill this thing – indeed, taking it alive might teach our guys a lot about the enemy – but it was killing my sister.

I hit the comms again.

“Kir? I’ve got a prisoner. A new kind of Xiroci, very powerful psyker. I think we need to take it alive, but –“

“Then take it alive,” said Kir. His signal was nice and clear – he must be quite close. “What’s the problem?”

“Glory’s being eaten alive by its psi static,” I said, knowing as I said it that it couldn’t make any difference.

He surprised me by saying,

“Then cap the bastard, Bob. We’re doing great down here – almost got the place subdued. It’s like all the Rocks are taking a nap. Will she make it if we take ten more to finish up?”

“Affirm.”

“Then the ship’ll be ours and we can do what we like with the fucker. See if you can stun it, but if it dies, it dies. Over.”

“Understand you, Kir. Out.”

Great. I clicked the rifle to “burn” and looked for a vital spot.

Glory stopped hugging herself and lay flat. Then she found her collar lock with her fingers, unclamped, and rolled over to empty her stomach.

Alice says Glorianna Stennis’s brain temperature returning to normal. Chance of permanent damage 7% +-2%.

I patted her shoulder and she took my hand, too weak to talk. She gave me a thumbs-up and tried to smile, but it wasn’t in her, not yet.

I swung the rifle back to point at the creature, and Glory’s face drained of color again. I pointed it away, and she looked immediately better.

I put the rifle down on the deck. I patted Glory’s hair until I found the TI magnet and pulled it free, then using the link from Alice to Willie, touched it to my own skull.

Immediately I was hearing a popping roar like an ocean of gravel hitting shore. I turned the volume down, down, down, and still it beat at my brain. I left the sensitivity set fairly high, trying to discern any hint of meaning. I’m not a natural psyker like Glory, so I don’t know what it’s like to listen to the direct, unparsed brain activity of another human being and make sense of it. They say it’s like learning Chinese, back when Chinese used the pictorial alphabet.

But you can understand the words without apprehending the sense behind them, as any parent’ll tell you. What I heard was:

It’s here it’s here its pulpy claws its shining teeth hot like red entrails slice lightning through innocent pores down around through steel like smoke or fog or mist or other fancies fading before the light of oh-nine-hundred clicking on against bare steel and float the dream of weight recurs and it is at home in it an evil dream living among dreams and stalking down the hallways into my mind! Get out get out get out save yourselves run where ARE you all now that I finally need you?

Whew.

Starving war. Starving architect-rejected war. What kind of defect likes this stuff? Win or lose, you still get to die alone. That’s not much of a win.

“Starving” is a curse word, yeah? I thought into the TI link, reflecting that he probably didn’t have a mental referent for sex, or the dirty words associated with it. Poor bastard. And “architect-rejected,” that’s like “God-damned,” isn’t it? Look at me while I think it slowly – God-damned. See what the parts mean?

Yes. God-damned war is right. Is it everywhere war? Or is there someplace not?

Sure, there’s places without the war, I thought. Unfortunately, this isn’t one of them. You and I, and Willie here, we’ve been put in this situation and we’ve got to do our duty, haven’t we? I mean, I can’t walk away and forget my mission. My country, my comrades need me to knock this ship out of action. I’ll save lives that way, human and cerb lives. I’m sorry I have to hurt your people to do it. If you’d stop raiding our worlds, there wouldn’t even have to be a war.

I don’t raid worlds, he thought. If I did it by mistake, I’ll stop.

It’s not just you. It’s your whole nation. You give it up and we’ll take you prisoner; you’ll be out of the war, but you won’t be able to go home. Not till all your people stop fighting.

I can’t make them stop! They don’t listen to me, except when I want bloodfood or I have a message to deliver. I do what they say, not they do what I say.

I’d damned well heard that before. And me a sergeant to boot.

Yeah, that’s how it is in a war. It has to be that way, or else we can’t all work together to get the job done. Has no one explained all this to you?

No. They order, they do not talk. I would like them to talk, or at least advise, but they use me as they use any other weapon. I am a gun who happens to have a mind. Not. I am not a gun with a mind, but they think I am.

Willie’s response came so fast it blurred by me in untranslated Cerb, like a brief glimpse into the dark interior of the machine mind. I’d forgotten he was in the link, actually. His input went through the TI transmitter, which meant I got the message relayed to my own mind, for what I could make of it

It was:

Agreement. Joint contributory ecstatic prototype development. Font set initial value. Member of identical model series.

The psi-thing and I went "huh?" together.

Idiomatic: Yeah, fuckin' A, Bubba.

**

After that, we had plenty to talk about.

The brain-thing's name turned out to be “Experimental Model 69153, Mark Three, of the Century of Burning Darkness in the Outer Spinward Fringe Satrapy”. Willie called him by the whole mouthful every time, cerbs having screwy ideas of precision, but to me he rapidly became just "Mark".

And no, we didn't kill him. We had finished the adults, finally, tracking them down one by one in their ambush holes in the dark corners of the ship. But our orders specified "Xiroci capable of bearing arms." A seven-foot globe of brain tissue isn't about to pilot a raiding ship, nor even pick up a gun without any proper hands. He was meant as a communicator -- military, yeah, but if that made him a soldier than so were the kids, who might grow up to carry a gun or pilot a ship some day. And none of us were about to slot a stadium's worth of innocent hatchlings, not without orders.

There turned out to be about nine thousand of the little gals (all Xiroci hatchlings are female, apparently) when we looked in every compartment. Lasko and Glory got to work organizing food for 'em out of the carrier's lifesystem. When we got it figured out, it seemed it was meant to house the kids for years between planets, during their maximum growth period. That massive keel turned out to be solid protein, packed so hard it was almost petrified.

We couldn't take them prisoner, not with our pickup ship as crowded as a tube station at lunchtime already. We could maybe manage to take one, only he'd starve on the way back. Despite their physical and strategic resemblance to the devouring locusts of Egypt, Xiroci can't eat our food. Nor we theirs, which limited our ability to remain on site. The machines in the galley converted the solid protein to edible food, but God only knows how they did it. We couldn't duplicate the process, and we couldn't take them with us -- they were massive, on the scale of the generators that power our ships.

Besides, by the time we had all this sorted out, Ted was in stark shape. If he didn't get evacuated to a proper hospital soon, he was going to die.

The carrier was a major enemy asset. We had the nukes to blow it in place, but then the kids would all starve. It's all very well to play the hard man and decree their sacrifice was worth the harm to the enemy cause, but that's the kind of thinking that's given our race the bulk of its grief down the ages. Anyway, it wasn't up to me. It was Kir's patrol, and his call.

Except it turned out that it wasn't. Seems no one else could hear old Mark's telepathy but me. Glory could pick him up right enough, but she was so sensitive it was like a rocket blast in her head. Not a lot of meaningful exchange of dialogue is possible when one of you's spelling out the message in Morse with grenades. And the rest could tell he was there, all right, but didn't get any message content at all, just a nasty pressure on their minds.

Thark said it was because I was more than half Rock myself, which earned him a dirty look from Glory, who hated the way Rock minds felt in deep rapport, and from me, for the obvious reasons.

So it was down to me to explain who we were, why Willie couldn't hear him, why we'd come (he hadn't a clue about the war -- as it turns out, nobody had told him) and why he couldn't come with us when we left. He may have been a purpose-made psychic weapons system, but he was also the sweetest, most innocent little child you could think of.

Mark, in fact, might have been a greater intel find than the carrier. He didn't have any more in common with his own people than he did with us; we were all hard-boned, small-brained midget deaf-mutes with opposable thumbs and too much hair, by him. Whether we wore our skeletons on the inside or outside didn't make much difference in his eyes. He'd just as soon have come with us as not.

But it was obvious that any attempt to disconnect his life-support structure and install it aboard the HATHCOCK would probably kill him. It'd be like taking a heart-lung support patient out of his room, down the stairs and into a car. A hospital ship with some electrical engineer support could have done it good style, of course, but we didn't happen to have one.

So Kir asked me for my assessment, and I gave it, and on that basis he ordered us to call the ship in. We left behind us an alien telepath who knew far too much about the Dual Democracy's navy and marines, a whole flock of alien flight cadets, and a trillion-visa space command carrier, all right where the enemy could scoop 'em up again.

The Admiralty was not impressed.

Still, I must say I was surprised by the intensity of the public outcry. What we'd done, in essence, was to fail to carry out a wholesale massacre to the degree desired. I knew there were countries which went apeshit when their lust for blood wasn't properly appeased, but I hadn't realized I lived in one.

Kir took the blame, of course -- bounced right out of the service and lucky, according to Ted, to avoid life at hard labor. The rest of us were supposed to get it in the neck, too, but the cerbs in Congress got the whole thing farmed out to committees and studies and hearings, and eventually it was quietly dropped. Not forgotten, of course, as I'm reminded when I'm stupid enough to open my mail. But dropped.

We were back on operational duty within six months. Glory and Winter went out earlier than that, having cooperated fully with the Admirals' Review Board; the rest of us had given the bare minimum. We were doing the good work again, wearing the uniform, but I doubted if we'd be wearing very many more stripes in our careers.

In our defense, we had sent all the fighters crashing into a convenient mountain on autopilot, one after the other. Even the Xiroci kids thought that was great fun. And we remembered to save one for the boffins, brought back in bits in the HATHCOCK's hold with films of the disassembly process. That was a hundred raiders Rocky was short for any raids he might have in mind. And we'd brought back priceless intel on their psi capabilities, and means of dealing with psychic detection.

But the reason the editorials and the protests washed right off my back is this: we left behind a living psycher so powerful that thousands of Xiroci were influenced by his thoughts. We'd shown him we weren't so bad. He actually liked me and Glory, although I think he had more of a meeting of the minds with Willie, of all people, than with me.

And this jolly brainbox was supposed to communicate with others like him all though the Xiroci regime. And he'd tell them that Earth folk, carbon and silicon both, are the tops of the pack, right swell lads. Great fun to have around, what with fireworks and athletics and all that. Can't imagine why we're at war with them.

We hate the Rocks and they hate us. Granted. But once they owe their comms net, which makes it possible for them to coordinate their nation's war effort, to beings like Mark, who don't hate us at all ... well, we might have passed up a chance to kill a carrier and a brain, but I'd like to think we might just have won the war.