Phule Me Twice (21 page)

Mahatma and Double-X had the skills she needed, while neither would be missed if they were away from base for a week or more. Except for the latter factor, Brandy and Escrima would have been her first choices for the assignment, but neither could just walk off without being missed. Well, she had the best team she could put together, and she'd have to trust it to do the job that had to be done.

She'd had the most difficulty deciding who was going to command the team. All three of the company's sergeants had wanted to do it, but none of them could just disappear from the base without being missed fairly quickly. Finally, Rembrandt took the bit in her teeth. "The major isn't any part of this mission, and the captain's not himself right now," she told them. "I'm next in rank, so it's my job to make the decisions."

That was before Sushi had stormed into her office, demanding to be put on the team. Her original instinct had been to leave him off the team, despite the fact that it was his idea to send the expedition out to begin with.

"Look, I can't bring you along," she told him. "You're a city boy. You'd slow us down way too much in the kind of country we'll be traveling in. Besides, we need you to monitor the alien signals so you can tell us about any changes in them. That means you have to stay behind and stay in touch via communicator."

Sushi wasn't budging. "Have you forgotten that the communicator's on the fritz?" he pointed out. "We can't pick up signals from more than a couple of miles beyond the perimeter, let alone where we're going to be. Now that I've figured out what frequency the aliens are using, I can monitor it with a handheld unit, which is what I've been working on the last couple of days. I've got it down to three kilos in weight, and it's no bigger than a shoebox."

After he showed her the new unit, Rembrandt was convinced, and she added him to the team. But this meant she'd have to cut somebody else to keep the team to a manageable size. That was going to be tricky; all the members had useful skills, although only Qual seemed really indispensable. Cutting either Garbo or Brick probably meant she'd have to drop the other, and she couldn't afford to lose both. So that left Mahatma and Double-X as the possible choices.

She agonized over it for a whole afternoon before a peremptory communicator message ordered the officers to the command center. Rushing to the meeting, she rounded a corner and nearly collided with Louie, speeding silently down the cross-corridor on his glide-board. The Synthian swerved just in time to avoid hitting Rembrandt; but in her abrupt stop, she wrenched her lower back. By the time she got to Botchup's office, it was starting to stiffen up. By the time the meeting was over, she couldn't stand. The autodoc scanned her, displayed a diagnosis of muscle spasm, and dispensed a bottle of pills that stopped the pain well enough for her to sit at a desk and work; but it was obvious she was in no shape to head a team into rough country.

That made Flight Leftenant Qual the de facto team leader. Now Rembrandt was glad she'd given in to Sushi's demands to be included; of all the remaining team members, he had the most leadership potential and the clearest sense of their mission. And, perhaps most importantly, he seemed to have the best idea what Qual was talking about; the translator's mangled renditions of the Zenobian Language were sometimes more impenetrable than the Alliance tax code.

She hobbled out to see the team meet at the perimeter for their departure. They slipped out of camp after midnight, with only the light of the gibbous Zenobian moon to guide them. (According to the books, the local moon-Vono, the Zenobians called it-was a bit smaller than old Earth's famous Luna, but it was bright and impressive enough to these legionnaires, most of whom came from small-mooned or even moonless worlds).

Actually, the team could probably have made its move in broad daylight, since everybody in Omega Company except for Botchup and Snipe knew what was about to happen. Of course, if the major caught them and tried to make a big deal of it, they might have to break a few more regulations than they'd planned on breaking. Even the success of their decidedly nonregulation mission wouldn't necessarily excuse the violations if the major decided to get vindictive, which struck everybody as exactly how he'd play it. Just to avoid unnecessary complications, they'd decided to go at night.

After a final check of equipment and supplies, Qual led them off into the dark. With luck, they'd reach their destination without being detected by the aliens or missed by the major. Standing there watching them fade into the darkness, Rembrandt had a twinge of regret at not being able to join them. But another twinge from her back told her in no uncertain terms that she'd made the right decision. She turned and walked slowly back to her bunk, hoping all her other decisions had been right. She'd know the answer soon enough.

The Zenobian desert, like those on most other planets, was a far more diverse and fertile environment than most city-dwellers would have realized. Especially to the Zenobians, who were most at home in a swamplike setting, any large dry area seemed much like any other. But as the team sent out to search for the source of the alien signals quickly saw, this was no simple unbroken expanse of dry sand. There was life aplenty here, some of it very lively and very dangerous to the unwary.

Flight Leftenant Qual knew some of it; city-bred though he was, he'd seen desert wildlife both during his military training and in zoos back home. By default, he was their native guide. But even he admitted that much of it was new to him. "If you espy anything you don't comprehend, make your path distant from it," he said cheerfully. The others nodded soberly and did as he said.

This policy was not easy to follow since (following the practice of desert experts everywhere) they planned to travel at night when the heat was least oppressive and when they were least likely to be picked out by anyone watching. Because the indigenous animals were themselves nocturnal in their habits, chance encounters were more frequent than the legionnaires would have liked. Every now and then something close by would make an unexpected noise, and one of the off-worlders was likely to jump. Sometimes Qual told them the names of the creatures: There was a loud-voiced, squatty thing he called a grambler, a little burrowing creature called a western flurn, and a furtive thing with eyes that shone brightly in their Legion-issue night vision goggles, which Qual's translator solemnly informed them was a spotted sloon.

Most of these were no trouble, but there was a lizardlike thing with half-inch-long teeth that could leap high off the ground to attack whatever had disturbed it. That little pest had them flinching at the least sign of motion in their pathway, with vigorous cursing in three languages and several dialects. The hopper-biter blended invisibly into the low brush. Even with the night vision goggles, it was hard to spot it in time to avoid a nasty bite. After a couple of near misses, the team took to detouring around any patch of vegetation-a tactic which, the farther they got into the desert, cost them more and more time.

Finally, confronted with a nearly unbroken patch of ankle-high brush to cross, Qual called a halt and turned to face the others in the party. "We are making too slow advancement," he said quietly. "Here is a technique that may expedite our forward gains." He loosened the sling on his stun ray and took the weapon in both hands.

"Oh, wow, I get it," said Brick. "We hose the area we want to walk through, and that knocks out the varmints so we can get past. Why didn't I think of that?"

"It is not a technique to employ constantly," said Qual. "With many stunners firing, there is danger of hitting one's teammates. If one is essaying a stealthy approach, it may alert the adversary if small animals in the path of approach begin to fall from their perches or drop from the air. And it is predestinated that a few of the stunned animals will be killed by falling or will be gobbled by others that recover more swiftly. And last, constant use dissipates the energy of the weapon, and it takes a certain time to recharge-a poor situation if one expects to encounter hostility."

"Which might or might not happen to us," said Sushi. He looked uncomfortable in his desert gear, but he'd kept up with the group fairly well. City-bred or not, he was in excellent physical condition from his hours of martial arts training.

"In that case, we need to be ready for all possibilities," said Mahatma, smiling. "That's what the sergeants keep telling us. It's impossible, of course."

"Sure, and so's FTL. Just ask any classical physicist," said Sushi. "Of course, you'd need time travel to go find one-they're all dead-and that's impossible, too."

"Impossible is not a word I have heard Captain Clown use," said Flight Leftenant Qual. "Therefore you will not let it rule your speculations. `The gryff sees only gryffish things, and therefore knows not the mountain,' or so my egg-mother always proclaimed. Of course gryffs are very stupid."

"What's a gryff?" asked Double-X.

"A large, clumsy omnivore," said Qual. "They do not inhabit the desert, so we need not worry about them." He pointed his stun ray forward and depressed the firing button. "Come, I will clear the way for a while, and you will follow. When my weapon has used half its charge, another of you will take over."

He stepped to the front of the group and began sweeping his ray across the path. After a moment, he moved forward, and the team fell in behind him. They had no further trouble with hopper-biters.

There was nothing Major Botchup enjoyed quite as much as springing a surprise inspection. It gave him an exhilarating sense of power to see grown men and women cringing when he came unexpectedly into sight. They'd pretend they didn't see him, hoping he would go away. Sometimes he would just go about his business. But other times just often enough to be unpredictable-he would pounce.

He didn't disguise the thrill he got from their panic as they realized they had no chance to conceal the things they'd let slide. And there were always things they'd let slide, things they wanted to conceal. That provided another thrill: finding all the evidence of their slacking off and wrongdoing and rubbing their noses in it, with ample punishment for every defect he found. Stern, unrelenting discipline was the best possible way to guarantee that the troops would live in fear of him, which was the only emotion the major wanted to inspire in his troops.

So there was a feral grin on his face as he emerged from the command entrance to the MBC first thing in the morning. This early, they wouldn't be expecting him. If he was lucky, they'd still be groggy from sleep. His eyes swung from side to side, his nose wrinkling as if he could sniff out his prey. He hadn't made up his mind just where he would strike today, but he knew he would eventually find a target. And then, his aim would be unerring, and those who had earned his righteous wrath would tremble at the memory for years to come.

There, in the shade of a tool shed across the central parade ground of the camp, he spotted a likely target. It was one of the sorry pack of aliens that had been exiled to this pariah company because they couldn't cut the mustard in the real Legion. A Volton, reading a book. There shouldn't be any time for reading. He could give the creature a good chewing out just on general principles.

But it wouldn't do to charge across the parade ground directly at his victim. If the Volton had something to hide, he might slink off when he saw Botchup coming, and that would make the major exert himself for no purpose. Better to take a roundabout approach and lure the loafing sophont into complacency. There was a small knot of legionnaires to his left, so he chose that direction.

As Major Botchup's eyes focused on the group he was approaching, they began to grow wider-and wider still. The group ahead of him was even worse than anything his previous experience of Omega Company had led him to expect. They were lounging idly, clearly doing nothing in particular. Worse, they were out of uniform! Instead, they wore a hodgepodge of civilian clothes, mixed with bizarre purple garments of various sorts. Most were unkempt and unshaven; in his entire career in the Space Legion, Major Botchup had never seen anything to approach it.

He swooped on the group like a tactical hoverjet discovering an unprotected ammo dump. "What the devil do you people think you're doing?" he snapped. "This is an outrage! Where are your uniforms?"

"We done took 'em off, Major," said one human in an accent that straddled the boundary between Standard and incomprehensible jargon. "Lieutenant Snipe's orders."

"What?" Botchup's face turned the same color as the antirobot camouflage the troops were wearing. "If Snipe said any such thing, I'll see him cashiered out of the service! Exactly when did he issue this order?"

"Well, it was just yesterday, Major," said a young woman whose face seemed vaguely familiar. "A bunch of us asked him about which orders we had to obey, and he said-"

"Which orders to obey? Preposterous!" By now, the major had gone well past the boiling point. "A legionnaire obeys all orders, or I'll know the reason why! Where are your sergeants?"

"I dunno, Major," said the first legionnaire-Street, according to his name tag: "They don't usually bother us long as we doin' the job-"

"They'll answer to me, then!" the major fumed. "What makes you think you can dress this way?"

The legionnaires all began talking at once. "Well, Major, Sarge said we was likely to see action against robots..."

"It was the captain told us to wear the uniforms he got us, so we figured we shouldn't keep wearin' 'em, 'cause he's not the CO anymore..."

"The captain said not to worry about the robots, but we aren't supposed to obey him..."

"I didn't have any of my old uniforms..."

"I didn't have anything but civvies, 'cause of when I joined up..."

"Quiet!" Major Botchup shouted. The entire group-indeed, the entire camp-fell into complete silence, broken only by the faint hum of machinery and the steady gurgling of the company water pump, not far from where they stood. The major put his hands on his hips and said in a voice that could have air-cooled the entire camp, "I don't know what Lieutenant Snipe told you, but I'm not going to let that get in the way of proper Legion discipline. Every man jack of you is going to report yourselves to Lieutenant Snipe for conduct unbecoming a legionnaire, and then you are going to your quarters and get into proper uniform. And you are every one of you going to do extra punishment duty, and it will be damned hard duty, I promise you!"

"But Major-" came a voice from the back of the group.

"Oh, shut up!" said Major Botchup. He looked around the camp, ready to flay another victim. Much to his annoyance, the Volton he'd observed before had gone away. But he'd find somebody else. He was sure of that.

The search party had settled down after its first full night of desert travel. Soon the Zenobian sun would be rising, and when it did, they needed to be under shade. They'd set up in a pair of insulated tents on the north side of a small hill, where they'd get a bit more shade. They'd try to sleep through the daylight hours and get a fresh start when the sun had dipped low in the sky again.

Just before they'd halted, Garbo had surprised a small creature near the edge of a water hole, and she and Qual had run it down. Now she and Brick were stewing it, stretched out with Legion-ration dried vegetables, in a pot over a portable heating unit between the tents; it smelled delicious. Meanwhile, Flight Leftenant Qual, whose race preferred its food uncooked, had gone out into the desert to find a breakfast more to his liking.

In his tent, Sushi had set up his portable detector unit and strung out a few meters of antenna between the tent and a spiky plant a little distance away, trying to get a more precise fix on the signal they were homing in on.

"How much farther do we have to go, Soosh?" asked Mahatma, who was sharing the tent with Sushi and Double-X. "This desert travel is nowhere near as oppressive as Major Botchup, but it'll never be my idea of relaxation."

"Hard to get a precise reading," said Sushi, fiddling with the fine tuning. "If I knew how strong the signal is at its source, I'd have a better idea. At a guess, it's a couple more days of travel; but if the signal's an order of magnitude stronger than I think, it could be a lot farther."

"What do we do if it's halfway around the planet?" said Double-X, who lay on top of his sleeping bag, propped up on one elbow to play a handheld computer game. "I ain't walkin' all that far, even if it does get me out from under the major's nose for a while."

"That's for Qual to decide," said Sushi. "It's his people that are being invaded, and it's a fairly big priority for them, so I suspect he's not going to give up unless it's obviously hopeless."

"What if it ain't obvious to him?" said Double-X. "He can live off the land, but we're gonna run out of food sooner or later, even if we do catch one of these desert rats every now and then."

"After seeing Garbo hunt, I would think we'd catch one more often than that," said Mahatma. "She is very efficient once she spots a prey creature. And unless my nose is playing tricks on me, this one will make very good eating."

"Yeah, it does smell good," admitted Double-X. "That don't mean I wanna eat it every night for the rest of my life-"

Sushi raised a hand to cut him off. "Hold it a moment, I'm getting something," he said. The receiver had begun emitting a series of high-pitched squeals and beeps.

"Aww, give a guy a break, Soosh. That's just noise," said Double-X. "You been out in the sun too long if you 'xpect that to make any sense."

"Soosh can't find out if it makes sense if you don't let him hear it," said Mahatma, with an expansive gesture. "Why not give him the break?"

Double-X had already opened his mouth to reply when he grasped Mahatma's point and closed it again, nodding silently. The beeps from the receiver continued, getting louder and softer as Sushi continued to play with the fine tuning. "I'd swear there's a repeating pattern, but I can't quite put my finger on it," he said. "I wish I had the captain's Port-a-Brain."

"I wish I had the money to buy one of those mothers and then go spend it on other stuff," said Double-X, but he kept his voice low.

"It's fading out," said Sushi, leaning closer to the receiver. "I'm losing the signal, damn it! No-quiet, it's getting stronger..." The others held their breath, but a moment later, the signal faded out entirely and was replaced by obviously random noise. Sushi pounded a fist into his thigh and. said, "Well, it's gone again. We might as well eat."

"If these creatures are affected by the heat, they're probably getting ready to go to sleep, just as we are," Mahatma pointed out. "That could explain the signal fading in daytime."

"It doesn't fade every day," grumbled Sushi. "There must be some other explanation."

"And perhaps we will learn it," said Mahatma, getting to his feet. "But for now, I am interested mostly in learning how this stew will taste. Gambolt cookery will be a new experience."