One conclusion was clear immediately. The destruction had been deliberate. The wreckers had wanted to hide something under the smoke and ruin.
Twilight came with subtropical suddenness. Soon the investigators were working uncomfortably under the glare of spotlights. At last the team commander ordered a halt. Full-scale studies would have to wait for morning.
The specialists retired into their barges for the night, chattering about what they had already discovered. There were traces, hints of things exciting and not a little disturbing.
Still, there would be ample time to do the work by day. The technicians closed their barges against the darkness. Six drone watchers rose to hover in silent, mechanical diligence, spinning patiently above the vehicles. Garth turned slowly under the starry night. Faint creakings and rustles told of the busy, serious work of the nocturnal forest creatures-hunting and being hunted. The watcher drones ignored them, rotating unperturbed. The night wore on.
Not long before dawn, new shapes moved through the starlit lanes underneath the trees. The smaller local beasts sought cover and listened as the newcomers crept past, slowly, warily.
The watcher drones noticed these new animals, too, and measured them against their programmed criteria. Harmless, came the judgment. Once again, they did nothing.
45 Athaclena "They"re sitting ducks," Benjamin said from his vantage point on the western hillside.
Athaclena glanced up at her chim aide-de-camp. For a moment she struggled with Benjamin"s metaphor. Perhaps he was referring to the enemy"s avian nature?
"They appear to be complacent, if that is what you mean," she said. "But they have reason. The Gubru rely upon battle robots more extensively than we Tymbrimi-We find them because they are expensive and overly predictable. Nevertheless, those drones can be formidable."
Benjamin nodded seriously. "I"ll remember that, ser."
Still, Athaclena sensed that he was unimpressed. He had helped plan this morning"s foray, coordinating with representatives of the Port Helenia resistance. Benjamin was blithely certain of its success.
The town chims were to launch a predawn attack in the Vale of Sind just before action was scheduled to begin here. The official aim was to sow confusion among the enemy; and maybe do him some harm he would remember. Athaclena wasn"t certain that was really possible. But she had agreed to the venture anyway. She did not want the Gubru finding out too much from the ruins of the Howletts Center.
Not yet.
"They"ve set up camp under the ruins of the old main building," Benjamin said. "Right where we expected them to plant themselves."
Athaclena looked at the chim"s solid-state night binoculars uncomfortably. "You are certain those devices aren"t detectable?"
Benjamin nodded without looking up. "Yes"m. We laid instruments like these out on a hillside near a cruising gasbot, and its flightpath didn"t even ripple. We"ve narrowed down the list of materials the enemy"s able to sniff. Soon ..."
Benjamin stiffened. Athaclena felt his sudden- tension.
"What is it?"
The chen crouched forward. "I see shapes movin" through the trees. It must be our guys gettin" into position. Now we"ll find out if those battle robots are programmed the way you expected."
Distracted as he was, Benjamin did not offer to share the binoculars. So much for patron-client protocol, Athaclena thought. Not that it mattered. She preferred to reach out with her own senses.
Down below she detected three different species of biped arranging themselves around the Gubru expedition. If Benjamin had spotted them they certainly had to be well within range of the enemy"s sensitive watch drones.
And yet the robots did nothing! Seconds beat past, and the whirling drones did not fire on the shapes approaching under the trees. Nor did they alert their sleeping masters.
She sighed in increased hope. The machines" restraint was a crucial piece of information. The fact that they spun on silently told her volumes about what was happening not only here on Garth but elsewhere, beyond the flecked star-field that glittered overhead. It told her something about the state of the Five Galaxies as a whole.
There is still law, Athaclena thought. The Gubru are constrained.
Like many other fanatic clans, the Gubru Alliance was not pristine in its adherence to the codes of planetary/ecological management. Knowing the avians" dour paranoia, she had figured that they would program their defense robots one way if the rules were still valid, and quite another if they had fallen.
If chaos had completely taken over the Five Galaxies, the Gubru would have programmed their machines to sterilize hundreds of acres rather than allow any risk to their feathery frames.
But if the Codes held, then the enemy did not yet dare break them. For those same rules might protect them, if the tide of war turned against their faction.
Rule Nine Hundred and Twelve: Where possible, non-combatants must be spared. That held for noncombatant species, even more than individuals, especially on a catastrophe world such as Garth. Native forms were protected by billion-year-old tradition.
"You are trapped by your own a.s.sumptions, you vile things," she murmured in Galactic Seven. Obviously the Gubru had programmed their machines to watch for the trappings of sapiency-factory-produced weapons, clothing, machinery-never imagining that an enemy might a.s.sail their camp naked, indistinguishable from the animals of the forest!
She smiled, thinking of Robert. This part had been his idea.
Gray, antelucan translucence was spreading across the sky, gradually driving out the fainter stars. To Athaclena"s left their medic, the elderly chimmie Elayne Soo, looked at her all-metal watch. She tapped its lens significantly. Athaclena nodded, giving permission for matters to proceed.
Dr. Soo cupped her mouth and uttered a high trilling sound, the call of a fyuallu bird. Athaclena did not hear the snapping tw.a.n.g of bowstrings as thirty crossbows fired. She tensed though. If the Gubru had invested in really sophisticated drones . . .
"Gotcha!" Benjamin exulted. "Six little tops, all broken to bits! The robots are all down!"
Athaclena breathed again. Robert was down there. Now, perhaps, she could believe that he and the others had a chance. She touched Benjamin"s shoulder, and the chim reluctantly handed over the binoculars.
Someone must have noticed when the monitor screens went blank. There was a faint hum, and the upper hatch of one of the hover tanks opened. A helmeted figure peered about the quiet meadow, its beak working in alarm as it saw the wreckage of a nearby watch robot. A sudden movement rustled the branches nearby. The soldier whirled about with its laser drawn as something or someone leaped forth from one of the neighboring trees. Blue lightning blazed at the dark figure.
It missed. The confused Gubru gunner couldn"t track a dim shape that neither flew nor fell but swung across the narrow clearing at the end of a long vine! Bright bolts went wide two more times, and then the soldier"s chance was gone." There was a "crack" as the shadowy figure wrapped its legs around the slender avian and snapped its spine.
Athaclena"s triple pulse beat fast as she saw Robert"s silhouette stand on the turret of the tank, over the crumpled body of the Talon Soldier. He raised an arm to signal, and suddenly the clearing was filled with running forms.
Chims hurried among the tanks and floaters, carrying earthenware bottles. Behind them shambled larger figures bearing bulky packs. Athaclena heard Benjamin mutter to himself in suppressed resentment. It had been her choice to include gorillas in this operation, and the decision was not popular.
"... thirty-five . . . thirty-six ..." Elayne Soo counted off the seconds. As the dawn light spread they could see chims clambering over the alien vehicles. This was gamble number three. Would surprise delay the inevitable reaction long enough?
Their luck ran out after thirty-eight seconds. Sirens shrieked, first from the lead tank and then from the one in the rear.
"Look out!" someone cried below.
The furry raiders scattered for the trees as Talon Soldiers tumbled out of their hover barges, firing searing blasts from their saber rifles. Chims fell screaming, batting at burning fur, or toppled silently into the undergrowth, holed from front to back. Athaclena clamped down on her corona in order not to faint under their agony.
This was her first taste of full-scale war. Right now there seemed to be no joke, only suffering and pointless, hideous death.
Then Talon Soldiers began falling. The avians hopped about seeking targets that had disappeared into the trees and were struck down by missiles as they stood. The fighters adjusted their weapons to seek out energy sources, but there were no lasers out there to home in on, no pulse-projectors, not even chemically powered pellet guns. Meanwhile crossbow bolts whizzed like stinging gnats. One by one, the Gubru warriors jerked and fell.
First one tank, then the other, began to rise on growling blasts of air. The lead vehicle turned. Its triple barrels then started blasting swaths through the forest.
The tops of towering trees seemed to hang in midair for brief moments as their centers exploded, before plummeting earthward in a haze of smoke and flying wood chips." Taut vines whipped back and forth like agonized snakes, spraying their hard-won liquors in all directions. Chims screamed as they spilled from shattered branches.
Is it worth it? Oh, can anything be worth this?
Athaclena"s corona had expanded in the emotion of the moment, and she felt a glyph start to take shape. Angrily she rejected the unformed sense image, an answer to her question. She wanted no laughing Tymbrimi poignancies now. She felt like weeping, human style, but did not know how.
The forest was afroth with fear, and native animals fled the devastation. Some ran right over Athaclena and Benjamin, squeaking in their panicked desperation to get away. The radius of slaughter spread as the deadly vehicles opened up on everything in sight. Explosions and flame were everywhere.
Then, as abruptly as it had started firing, the lead tank stopped! First one, then another barrel glowed reddish white and shut down. Half of the noise abated.
The other fighting machine seemed to be suffering similar problems, but that one tried to continue firing, in spite of its crackling, drooping barrels.
"Duck!" Benjamin cried out as he pulled Athaclena down. The crew on the hillside took cover just in time as the rear tank exploded in a searing, actinic flash. Pieces of metal and shape-plast armor whistled by overhead.
Athaclena blinked away the sharp afterimage. In a momentary confusion brought on by sensory overload, she wondered why Benjamin was so obsessed with Earthly waterfowl.
"The other one"s jammed!" Somebody shouted. Sure enough, by the time Athaclena was able to look again it was easy to see smoke rising from the lead tank"s ap.r.o.n. The turret emitted grinding noises, and it seemed unable to move. Mixed with the pungent odor of burning vegetation came the sharp smell of corrosion.
"It worked!" Elayne Soo exulted. Then she was over the top and gone, running to tend the wounded.
Benjamin and Robert had proposed using chemicals to disable a Gubru patrol. Athaclena then modified the plan to suit her own purposes. She did not want dead Gubru, as had been their policy so far. This time she wanted live ones.
There they were now, bottled up inside their vehicles, unable to move or act. Their communications antennae were melted, and anyway, by now the attacks in the Sind had surely begun. The Gubru High Command had worries enough closer to home. Help would be some time coming.
Silence held for a moment as debris rained to the forest floor. Dust slowly settled.
Then there was heard a growing chorus of high shrieks -- shouts of glee unaltered since before Mankind began meddling with chimpanzee genes. Athaclena heard another sound, as well ... a rolling, ululating cry of triumph-Robert"s "Tarzan" call.
Good, she thought. It is good to know he lived through all that killing.
Now if only he follows the plan and stays out of sight from now on!
Chims were emerging from the toppled trees, some hurrying to help Dr. Soo with the injured. Others took up positions around the disabled machines.
Benjamin was looking to the northwest, where a few stars faded before the dawn. Faint, warlike rumblings could be heard coming from that direction. "I wonder how Fiben and the city boys are doin" at their end," he said.
For the first time Athaclena set her corona free. Released at last, it crafted kuhunnagarra ... the essence of indeterminacy postponed. "It is beyond our grasp," she told him. "Here, in this place, is where We act."
With a raised hand she signaled her hillside units forward.
46 Fiben Smoke rose from the Valley of the Sind. Scattered fires had broken out in wheat fields and among the orchards, injecting soot into a morning fast growing pale and dim.
A hundred meters high in the air, perched on the rough wooden frame of a handmade kite, Fiben used field gla.s.ses to scan the scattered conflagrations. The fighting had not gone at all well here in the Sind. The operation had been intended as a quick hit-and-run uprising-a way to hurt the invader. But it had turned into a rout.
And now the cloud deck was dropping, as if overladen with dark smoke and the sinking of their hopes. Soon he wouldn"t be able to see beyond a kilometer or so.
"Fiben!"
Below and to the left, not far from the kite"s blocky shadow, Gailet Jones waved up at him. "Fiben, do you see anything of C group? Did they get the Gubru guard post?"
He shook his head, exaggeratedly.
"No sign of them!" he called. "But there"s dust from " enemy armor!"
"Where? How much? We"ll give you more slack so you can get a better-"
"No way!" he shouted. "I"m comin" down now."
"But we need data-"
He shook his head emphatically. "There are patrols all over the place! We"ve got to get out of here!" Fiben motioned to the chims controlling his tether rope.
Gailet bit her lip and nodded. They started reeling him in.
As the attack collapsed and their communications unraveled, Gailet had only become more frantic for information. Frankly, he couldn"t blame her. He, too, wanted to know what was happening. He had friends out there! But right now it might be better to think of their own skins.
And it all started so well, he thought as his craft slowly descended. The uprising had begun when chim workers employed at Gubru construction sites set off explosives carefully emplaced over the last week. At five of the eight target sites, satisfying fiery plumes had risen to meet the dawn sky.
But then the advantages of technology began to be seen. It -had been mind-numbing, witnessing how quickly the automated defense systems of the enemy responded, scything through advancing teams of irregular fighters before their a.s.saults could barely begin. To his knowledge not a single of the more important objectives had been taken, let alone held.
All told, things did not look good at all.
Fiben was forced to luff the kite, spilling air as the crude glider dropped. The ground rushed up, and he gathered his legs for the impact. It came with a jarring thud. He heard one of the wooden spars break as the wing took up most of the shock.
Well, better a spar than a bone. Fiben grunted as he undid his harness and wrestled free of the heavy homespun fabric. A real parasail, with composite struts and duracloth wings, would have been an awful lot better. But they still didn"t know what it was about some manufactured goods that the invader was able to home in on. So he had insisted on homemade-and clumsy-subst.i.tutes.
The big, scarred chim named Max stood watch nearby, a captured Gubru laser rifle in one hand. He offered a hand. "You okay, Fiben?"
"Yeah, Max, fine. Let"s get this thing broken down."
His crew hurried to disa.s.semble the kite and get it under the cover of the nearby trees. Gubru floaters and fighters had been whistling overhead ever since the ill-fated foray had begun before dawn. The kite was almost insignificant, virtually invisible to radar or infrared. Still, they had surely been pushing their luck using it in daylight like this.
Gailet met them at the edge of the orchard. She had been reluctant to believe in the Gubru secret weapon-the enemy"s ability to detect manufactured goods. But she had gone along partway at his insistence. The chimmie wore a half-length brown robe over shorts and a homespun tunic. She clutched a notebook and stylus to her breast.
Getting her to leave behind her portable data screen had taken a major effort of persuasion.
If Fiben had imagined for a moment that he saw relief on her face when he picked himself out of the wreckage, he stood corrected. She was all business now.
"What did you see? How heavy were the enemy reinforcements from Port Helenia? How close did Yossy"s team get to the skynet battery?"
Good chens and chimmies have died this morning, but all she seems to care about is her d.a.m.ned data!
The s.p.a.ce-defense strongpoint had been one of several targets of opportunity. Until now the few piddling ambushes in the mountains had hardly been enough to raise the enemy"s notice. Fiben had insisted that the first raid would have to count big. They would never find the enemy so unprepared again.
And yet Gailet had planned the operation in the Vale of Sind around her observers, not the fighting units. To her, information was more important than any harm they might do to the enemy. And to Fiben"s surprise the general had agreed.
He shook his head. "There"s a lot of smoke over in that direction, so I guess maybe Yossy accomplished something." Fiben dusted himself off. There was a tear in his homespun overalls. "I saw plenty of enemy reinforcements moving about. It"s all up here." He tapped his head.
Gailet grimaced, obviously wishing she could hear it all right now. But the plan had been to be away well before this. It was getting awfully late. "Okay, we"ll debrief you later. By now this rendezvous must be compromised."
You gotta be kidding, Fiben thought, sarcastically. He turned. "You guys got that thing buried yet?"
The three chims in the kite team were kicking leaves over a low mound under the bulging roots of a f.o.o.k sap tree. "All done, Fiben." They began collecting their hunting rifles stacked beneath another tree.
Fiben frowned. "I think we"d better get rid of those. They"re Terran-make."
Gailet shook her head emphatically. "And replace them with what? If we"re stuck with just our six or ten captured Gubru lasers, what can we accomplish? I"m willing to attack the enemy stark naked if I have to, but not unarmed!" Her brown eyes were hot.
Fiben felt his own anger. "You"re willing to attack. Why not go after the d.a.m.n birds with a sharpened pencil then! That"s your favorite weapon."