The Outpost (14 page)

Now, if you only had to complete one mission before you got mustered out, you could live with those final odds—or at least you could on six days out of eleven. But when that sonuvabitch Bigelow had you flying two missions a day, you had to figure your number was up by the morning of the second day.

“Shit!” muttered O’Grady. “The best odds I could ever get on you guys were three-to-five against!”

“You bet on us?” asked Max.

“With odds like that?” said O’Grady. “No way. They were blowing you out of the sky like there was no tomorrow. Like any smart gambler, I went with the run.”

Can’t say I blame you (said Max). Hell, if I’d been able to put a little money down on the Pelopennes, I’d have done it in a flash. Believe me, none of us looked forward to running—or flying—the gauntlet of all those imploders every morning and evening. We begged the general to come up with some other strategy, but he didn’t have any ground troops left, and he refused to either surrender or declare a victory and get the hell out, so we kept flying missions.

By the beginning of the fourth week, I was the only pilot still on active duty. All the others were dead or wounded. He’d started with 406 airships and an equal number of pilots, and now all he had left was 42 ships and one pilot (me), the rest having joined the enemy or been melted away, mostly the latter. So I went up to General Bigelow and suggested that maybe it was about time for a different strategy, since this one sure as hell wasn’t working.

But he was under pressure to win the war, and no one was sending him any men or supplies, and all he had left was me and a couple of platoons that he was afraid to send against the enemy, since the enemy had this habit of looking awful friendly at close quarters.

Well, I wasn’t happy about it, but he offered to double my pay, so I agreed to fly one more mission.

I barely made it back to base, and just as I was having a beer in the officer’s club, Bigelow came up to me and told me he wanted me to go right back up.

“Meaning no disrespect, General Bigelow sir,” I said, “but you can go fuck yourself.”

“You’re all I’ve got!” he snapped. “I will not have it go on my record that I lost my final battle.”

“There’s the airship,” I said, pointing out the window. “Go fight it yourself.”

“I’m a general,” he said. “I don’t sully my hands with the actual fighting. That’s what I have
you
for.”

“You ain’t got me,” I said. “I resign. Use some other poor bastard.”

“They’ve all deserted.”

“Every last one of them?” I asked.

He nodded.

“You mean I’ve been dropping bombs on our own men?” I demanded.

“They’re not our own men anymore! They've gone over to the enemy.”

I couldn’t say I blamed them. After all, the enemy probably fed them better, and based on what I’d heard of Hurricane Smith and his lady love, they sure kept ‘em warmer at nights.

Well, we haggled back and forth for the better part of the afternoon. I kept saying that I wasn’t going to play target for the Pelopennes anymore, and that I also didn’t feel right dropping bombs on my friends, and he kept saying that he wasn’t about to surrender or sue for peace, and that anyone who was shacked up with a lady insect, no matter what she looked like on the outside, wasn’t any friend of mine.

Finally, the sun started setting without anything being settled, and it didn’t look like anything
would
get settled, and then the General pulled out his burner and pointed it between my eyes and explained that if I flew one last mission there was a chance, however slight, that I might survive it, whereas if I refused one more time, there was absolutely no chance that I’d survive a laser blast at a distance of six inches, which was a very telling argument.

“All right,” I said. “But only if you’ll agree that this is the very last one.”

“I agree,” he said. “And to prove it, we’ll load your airship with every explosive that remains on the base.”

We spent the next few minutes arguing over how much of a bonus he was going to pay me if I made it back alive, and since I didn’t trust him any farther than I can spit with my mouth closed, I made him transfer the funds to my account back on Binder X before I finally got up and walked over to the airfield.

“You mind if I choose my own target?” I asked, as I was climbing into the airship.

“Be my guest,” he said. “Just remember to dump your entire payload and let’s bring this noble struggle to a satisfying conclusion.”

“Roger and out,” I said, closing the hatch behind me.

I took off, climbed to about five thousand feet, and looked off toward the enemy lines out on the horizon.

And then I got to doing some serious thinking. I didn’t have anything against the Pelopennes, and neither did all the Men who’d gone over to them. Now, maybe if I’d known a Pelopenne I might have felt different, but I didn’t. On the other hand, I knew General Bigelow.

So I flew back over the base, dropped my payload, and brought the struggle to a satisfying conclusion.

Well, satisfying to everyone except General Bigelow, anyway.

“That can’t be right,” said Big Red.

“Why the hell not?” demanded Three-Gun Max. “Every word was God’s own truth, except for a couple of poetic flourishes here and there.”

“I mean, if you ended the war, what the hell was Gravedigger Gaines doing there?”

“Why don’t you ask
him
?” said Max, who seemed to have lost all interest in the Pelopennesian War now that his story was done.

Big Red turned to the Gravedigger. “Well?”

The Sergeant Who Hated Everyone

I wasn’t there to fight a war (said Gaines). I was a bounty hunter, not a soldier.

I’d spent the better part of a year looking for Mad Jesse Wilkins. He’d killed more than three dozen men back in the Monarchy, as well as a fair number of women, children, dogs, cats, and alien pets. He lit out for the Frontier when he found out that I was on his trail. I just missed him by a day on Roosevelt III, and I was no more than half an hour behind him when he made his escape from Far London.

He headed toward the Albion Cluster, changed his identity and signed on as a sergeant in the Pelopennesian War—a neat little riff on the notion of the coward hiding out in the middle of a battlefield.

By the time I got there the war was over. There was nothing but a huge crater where the human headquarters and landing field had been—

“Just call me Bullseye Max!”!” shouted Max with a laugh. “I never miss what I aim for!”

I had an urge to order the men’s room servo-mech to tell everyone whether Max always hit what he aimed for, but I was more interested in hearing the rest of the Gravedigger’s story, so I kept quiet.

Anyway (continued Gaines), I couldn’t find any sign of life … but I knew Mad Jesse’s skills, and I figured he was a little harder to kill than most men, so I decided to do a systematic search of the planet.

That’s when I found out that most of the men were still alive, and that they’d made their peace with the Pelopennes even if their officers hadn’t. At first I thought they were unwittingly laying the groundwork for another war, one that would be fought over all the Pelopenne women they’d accumulated, but then I learned that each Pelopenne female laid about ten thousand eggs a year, and that the larvae reached maturity in about five years, so no one was apt to mind a few hundred of them choosing to live with the former enemy.

As a matter of fact, the men had all pretty much decided to go back to human worlds, since it was a lot easier for their womenfolk to pass as humans than for them to pass as insects. Now that the war was now officially over, the Monarchy was preparing to rebuild the planet and throw all kinds of money at the Pelopennes. They were also willing to do just about any favors that were requested, which included transporting all the men and their lady friends to other worlds.

I checked each man as he left, and Jesse wasn’t among them. (It’s pretty hard to disguise yourself when you’re 400 pounds and have steel teeth and wear a patch over one eye.)

I found him a few days later, holed up in a cave halfway up a mountain, still wearing his sergeant’s uniform. I waited until he went out to gather some firewood and got the drop on him when he returned.

“Hi, Jesse,” I said, pointing my screecher right at him.

“Either shoot or get the hell out of my way,” he said without slowing his pace. “I got things to do.”

“Shut up and listen to me,” I said. “There’s a million-credit price on your head. I’ll make you the same proposition I make everyone I hunt down: pay me the million credits yourself and you can walk away a free man.”
 

“Some lawman!” he snorted contemptuously.

“I’m not a lawman,” I said. “I’m what you might call an independent contractor. My only loyalty is to whoever pays me. That could be you.”

“I ain’t got a million credits,” said Mad Jesse. “And if I did, I wouldn’t give it to you anyway.”

“You spent all the money you got for killing all those men and women?”

“Nobody paid me nothing,” he said. “I
like
killing people.”

“Well, that makes it kind of awkward,” I said. I looked around. “You got any partners here?”

“You mean those sniveling little turncoats?”