Jem (40 page)

It was the Russian pilot, Kappelyushnikov, sitting cross-legged at a gun pit and talking to Danny Dalehouse, on duty inside it. Why not? Ana changed course to approach them and wished them a good evening.

"Is truly good, Anyushka? But Danny Dalehouse has told me of death of Ahmed Dulla. I am deeply sympathetic for you."

There it was, the first time someone had spoken of it to her. She discovered that it was not impossible for her to respond.

"Thank you, Visha," she said steadily. "What, have you become a monk that you do not dance tonight?"

"Is no one I care to dance with," he said gloomily. "Also have been having most interesting discussion with Danny on subject of slavery."

"And what have you concluded, then, Danny?" she asked brightly. "Are we all slaves to your mistress, the beautiful blond colonel?"

He did not answer directly, but chose to be placating. "I know you're upset, Ana. I'm sorry, too."

"Upset?" She nodded judiciously, looking down into the pit at him. "Yes, perhaps. I must assume that my home has been destroyed—yours, too, I suppose. But you are braver than I. I am not brave; I become upset. It upsets me that what has happened on Earth is now to happen again, here. It upsets me that my—that my friend is dead. It upsets me that the colonel intends to kill a great many more persons. Can you imagine? She proposes to tunnel under the Fuel camp and explode a nuclear bomb, and that upsets me."

Why are you doing this? she asked herself; but she knew that she could not accept more sympathy without crying, and she was not ready to cry before these men. At least she had diverted them. Dalehouse was frowning.

"We don't have any nuclear weapons," he objected.

"Softheaded person!" she scoffed. "Your mistress has what she wants to have. I should not be astonished if she had a fleet of submarines or a division of tanks. She wears weapons as she wears that cheap perfume. The smell of them is always around her."

"No," he said doggedly, peering up at her, "you're wrong about the nuclear weapons. She couldn't conceal that from us. And she's not my mistress."

"Do not flatter yourself that I care. She may have her sexual excesses with whomever she likes, and so may you."

Kappelyushnikov coughed. "I think," he said, "dance has suddenly become more attractive."

As he stood up, Ana put her hand on his arm. "I am driving you away. Please forgive me."

"No, no, Anyushka. Are difficult times for all, nothing to forgive." He patted her hand, then grinned and kissed it. "As to myself," he said, "I see beautiful blond colonel roaming about alone, and perhaps she wishes to dance or otherwise relate to some new person, such as I. Also do not care for cheap perfume worn by big cockroach. You do not yourself desire to dance? Or otherwise relate? No. Then stay with friend Danny."

They watched him walk steadily toward Marge Menninger, strolling past her checkpoints. They heard her laugh as Gappy spoke to her; then he shrugged and moved on toward the dance floor.

The Krinpit, in his random stagger around the beach, was coming closer. It was true that the stench of his exudations was strong. So was the sighing, droning sound of his presence. Ana listened, then said gloomily, "This one is muttering about his love now," she said. "It was killed somehow, I cannot tell how. I think Ahmed had something to do with it, and it is for that that it is determined to kill human beings. But it had become Ahmed's ally! Dan, is not that lunacy? It is as though killing has become an end in itself. It no longer matters who is killed or for what possible gain the killing is done. Only the killing itself matters."

Dalehouse stood up in his shallow rifle pit, looking up the hill toward the dancers. "She's coming this way," he said. "Listen, before she gets here. About her being my mistress—"

"Please, Danny. I spoke without thinking and because I am, yes, upset. It is not a time to worry about personal matters."

Clearly he was not satisfied and would have pursued the subject, but Margie was now too close. She paused to light a cigarette, studying the Krinpit and its guard, now a model of military deportment, his recoilless at port arms as the colonel approached. Then she came smiling over to Danny and Nan. "Getting it on, are you?" she said amiably. "When was the last time you checked your earphones, Danny?"

Guiltily Dalehouse clapped the phone to one ear. He had been neglecting the buried microphone probes, which were supposed to warn of burrowers digging toward him under the ground. There was no sound. "Sorry, Margie," he said.

She shook her head. "When you're on duty, that's
colonel.
And when I say frog, you hop. Now that that's understood," she said, smiling sunnily, "would either of you folks like a hit before we talk some business?"

"I am not in the habit of using narcotics," Ana said.

"Pity. Danny?" She watched while Dalehouse filled his lungs, and as she took the stick back from him, she said, "I want you to draft your gasbag friend. One hundred and—" She glanced at her wristwatch. "One hundred and eight hours from now, give or take a little, we're going to hit the Greasy camp, and he's going to be our air arm."

Dalehouse coughed and spluttered. "He—he can't—"

"Take your time, Danny," she encouraged. "While you're getting your breath, just listen for a moment. Storm's over. Looks like we've got maybe five or six good days. I'm taking fifteen front-line effectives, plus you, Danny. We'll mop up that camp without breathing hard. Only I don't want to take a plane, and I don't want you or Gappy floating around up there where they can see you, and that leaves Charlie."

"Charlie can't fight!"

"Well," she said reasonably, "come to that, I don't figure you for your real Geronimo trained killer, either. But I don't expect it of you. You communicate. Charlie observes. The Greasies won't pay any attention to one more fartbag hanging around—"

"Bullshit they won't! They've been shooting balloonists down all along."

"Danny," she said, "I'm not asking your advice. I'm giving you an order." She dragged on the joint, down to the last centimeter, and then carefully rubbed it out and pocketed it before exhaling. "You see," she said, "the Greasies are going to come to the same conclusions I did, only it'll take them a little longer. One of us has to run things. The only way to do that is to knock the other out. All Charlie has to do is hang in there with his radio and keep us posted if they send up a plane or put some people out in the woods. I'll bring the company up overland. But we're naked without air cover. We need to know when to get out of sight. That's easy enough for him, right?"

"Well, sure. But—shit, Margie. He's almost the last survivor. It's a lot to ask—"

"But I'm not asking, Danny. You keep making that same mistake. I'm ordering. If he doesn't, he'll make a nice flame." She scratched under her belt, regarding him amiably. "So after the dance I break the news to the camp, and tomorrow this time we're on our way."

"To atom-bomb the Fuel Bloc," said Ana bitterly.

Marge Menninger's face froze. After a moment she said, "I guess I'll let that pass, Dimitrova. I didn't specifically order you to keep your mouth shut. But I won't let it pass again. What you hear when you're translating is
classified. "

"Holy Christ," Dalehouse said. "You really have a nuclear bomb?"

"Bet your ass, Danny. You've got a piece of it right there in your ground mikes."

"Where? You mean the plutonium power-packs? That's no good, Margie—colonel, I mean. There's not enough of them. Even if there were, you couldn't flange them together to make a bomb."

"Wrong and wrong, Danny. Takes eighteen hundred grams and a bit to fission. I have a little over six thousand grams, all tidied away in the stores marked 'fuel replacements.' All this was planned a long time ago, and they'll fit together because some pretty high-powered weapons people designed them to do that before the first ship took off. Oh, it's not one of your hundred-megaton jobs. Maybe not even a kiloton, because I don't have containment to keep the parts together very long. But I don't want a big one. I don't want to wipe out the Greasy camps, I want to own them. I want to take out their ammunition and their food stores, and I know just the place to put baby for that. Then they can beg."

She looked serene and innocent as she said it, and Dalehouse responded with shocked disbelief. "That's—that's unprovoked aggression! A stab in the back!"

"Wrong, Dalehouse. That's preemption. The Greasies don't have a choice, either. They just haven't figured it out yet."

"Bullshit! It's what the Japanese did at Pearl Harbor all over again!"

She opened her eyes wide. "Sure, why not? There was nothing wrong with Pearl Harbor, except they fucked it up. If they'd gone on to take out the carrier fleet and follow up with a landing, history would be a lot different. You'd be saying 'Pearl Harbor' the way you say 'Normandy' now, only you'd be saying it in Japanese."

She seemed quite pleased with herself, but then she hesitated. She sought a dry place on the ground and sat down before adding, "But I will admit to you two dear old friends from Bulgaria that right now I'm scared and tired and not what you'd call real happy with the way things are going. I— what's the matter with that thing?"

The Krinpit was staggering closer to them, moaning and stridulating. Ana listened. "He is quite hard to follow. He is speaking of Poison Ghosts and Ghosts Above—that is, of ourselves and of balloonists. He seems to have us confused in his mind."

"All enemies look alike after awhile, I guess. Tell him to back away. I don't like the way he smells."

"Yes, Colonel Menninger." But before Ana could summon up the commands in Krinpit-Urdu, Margie stopped her again.

"Wait a minute. What was that?" There had been a voice on the PA system along with the blare of dance music.

"I couldn't make it out," said Dalehouse, "but I do hear something. Out in the woods. Or in the air—"

Then the dance music abruptly died, and a scared voice replaced it. "Colonel Menninger! All personnel! Aircraft approaching!"

The sounds were clear now, two sets of them: the whickering putt-putt of a helicopter, and a quicker, higher sound. The dancers scattered.

Over the trees two shapes appeared. Neither was moving very fast, but they came without warning: the Fuel helicopter and a stub-winged STOL plane, one they had not seen in the air before. They did not come in peace. Soldiers strapped to the pods of the helicopter were firing incendiary rockets while wing-mounted machine guns on the STOL strafed the camp. The fixed-wing plane made a roaring run that took it out over the water; then it rose, turned, and dived in again. On its second pass the guns did not fire, but four tiny rockets leaped out from under the wing, streaked into the store shed, and set fire to a row of tents.

The Greasies had not been so slow after all.

Here and there, around the camp and inside it, perimeter guards and the more quick-witted of the dancers were beginning to return the fire. Margie jumped to her feet and began to run toward the nearest rocket launcher, and then, on its third pass, the stub-winged plane swerved toward her. It was using both machine guns and a flamethrower now. As the bullets stitched toward her, Margie dodged and fell, almost beside the Krinpit; and the creature rose up high above her. It launched itself, two hundred kilograms of half-molted body, on top of Marge Menninger.

Sharn-igon knew that this would be his last molt, terribly premature, agonizing, fruitless. He would never experience the satisfying itch of his new carapace as it hardened and stretched over the soft inner pulp, never feel the sexual stirring of the newly shelled and embark on the quick conquest of a female with a he-mate. As the Poison Ghosts Above zoomed in toward the camp, he tried to warn these new allies. But they were deaf to the brilliant sounds from over the trees, deaf to his warnings.

The pain was too much.

It had been his intention to assist them in killing each other to the maximum extent possible, and then to kill the survivors himself. But perhaps he had done all the assisting he would ever do. The agony of his new shell, already beginning to crack again, tormented his thoughts. The blinding sounds of the aircraft and the explosions dazed him.

There was only one Poison Ghost left that he could kill. It would have to be enough. He raised himself on his pitifully soft-shelled limbs, leaned forward, and crashed down on top of her just as the soft, deadly tongue of the flamethrower licked at them both.

By then the whole camp was firing at the aircraft—or that much of it that was still able to fire. But the planes were out of reach. They hung out over the water, a kilometer and more away, the helicopter dancing lightly, the STOL turning in small circles, and did not return to the attack.

The next assault came from another place.

A scream from one of the machine-gun pits, and the two soldiers in it were down, ripped to shreds. Out of the pit came a long, limber, black shape wearing tiny goggles and racing on its dozen limbs to the nearest knot of humans; and another behind him, and another.

The burrowers managed to kill more than ten of the survivors. But that was all. Even with the sunglasses they were no match for trained human soldiers on the surface of the planet. If the planes had continued their attack—but they didn't. The human defenders quickly rallied, and at the end there were fifty burrowers stretched out on the ground, soiling the sand with their watery black blood. No more came because there were no more in the nest to come. That burrow had been wiped out.

Dan Dalehouse stood peering out over the sea while one of Cheech Arkashvili's assistants bandaged a deep gash on his arm. The planes were gone. In the middle of everything, they had quietly flown down the coastline and away.

"And why didn't they finish us off?" he asked.

There was no answer.

BY THE TIME they found Margie Menninger, still alive, the fight was long over and the camp was almost functioning again.

She had lain under the dead and stinking Krinpit for more than two hours, stunned, half-suffocated, unable to shift the gross dead weight on top of her, her limbs twisted painfully but unhurt. Like the djinn in the bottle, at first she would have given a king's ransom to her rescuer. When they finally heard her sand-gagged attempts at a bellow and dug her out, what she wanted to give was death.