It grew eerily quiet. In the dim underground shadows, dust sifting through, the fighting had stopped for the moment. The Arachnoids seemed content to wait for us to push deeper, into the next level of tunnels.
I had the medical officer set up his aid station and told the troopers to take a quick squirt of nutrients from the nipples in their helmets. The nutrients included neural stimulators designed to counteract the effects of physical exhaustion and mental fatigue. The troopers called it “joy juice,” or “mother’s milk,” or worse.
I sent a team back to the surface to bring down all the grenades and explosives from the magazines that the landers had left. They caught a few Arachnoids out there, hiding in the wreckage of some of the crashed landers, waiting to snipe at unsuspecting humans.
“We got ’em all,” reported the sergeant who led the ammunition detail. Then he added, “I think.”
“Were they wearing any kind of protective suits?” I asked through my helmet radio.
“No, sir,” said the sergeant. “None that I could see.”
The scientists would be interested in that, I thought. I had the grenades and heavier explosives distributed among the surviving soldiers and gave them orders to blanket the tunnels with explosives before moving into them.
“Blast every hatch you see,” I told them, “and then blast whatever’s on the other side of the hatch. Check every crevice, every crack in the rock. Go slowly, make certain you’ve cleared the area around you before advancing. Now let’s move.”
It was slow, painful going. Hours dragged into days. We inched along the tunnels, probing for trapdoors and hidden nests of spiders waiting to pounce on us. I called up to the fleet and requested more explosives.
“Do you have anything that can produce a high-temperature flame?” I asked.
The Tsihn weaponry officers conferred among themselves, then called back to me that they could send down drums of chemicals which, when mixed together, burst spontaneously into flame.
“Good!” I said. “Send down all you can.”
The Tsihn hesitated. In the image on my visor I could see its tongue flicking nervously.
“These are very volatile liquids,” it said. “Very dangerous to handle.”
I laughed at it. “What do you think we’re doing down here, having a picnic?”
It did not understand my words, but my tone was clear. Within a few hours a shuttle craft took up a parking orbit a scant hundred meters off the asteroid and off-loaded dozens of large, bulky drums. A Tsihn officer came down to the second-level cavern that I had turned into my command post. It was clad in an armored space suit just like the rest of us; the only way we could tell it was not one of us was from the fact that its suit was clean and undamaged.
It explained that the liquids in the drums were hypergolic: mix them and they burst into flame hot enough to melt aluminum.
“Fine,” I said. “That’s just what we need.”
The drums were identified by Tsihn symbols. They looked like abstract pictures to me, little black blots spattered on the curved sides of the big gray drums.
“You must be very careful with these chemicals,” the Tsihn officer kept repeating. “They are very dangerous.”
“That’s just what we want,” I assured it.
The Tsihn left as quickly as it could.
We went to work on the tunnels, pouring a whole drumful of one chemical down one hatch and then tipping over its hypergolic counterpart and moving out of the way—fast!—as a river of flame burst down on the shrieking, skittering Arachnoids. One by one we cleaned out the tunnels, advancing as soon as the flames had died away, crawling through smoke so thick and oily and choking that we sealed our visors and went back onto the life-support systems in our suits.
Down level after level we crawled, through the sooty smoke, through the charred heaps of hundreds of spiders. Their flesh crackled and broke apart in brittle chunks as we crawled past them. Even sealed inside our suits we found the smell nauseating. This was no longer a battle, it was extermination, I thought. The Arachnoids don’t have a chance against the liquid fire. I could see, even in the dim light through my helmet visor, that the fire was so intense it had fused the tunnel walls into a slick, glassy surface.
But they were not finished yet. Not quite.
We had made our way down to the core of the tunnel complex, a large cavern near the heart of the asteroid, big enough for us to stand in. Five major tunnels converged here, and five rivers of flame had poured down into this cavern to turn it into a pit of hell. The floor, the walls, the domelike ceiling were blackened. There had been equipment down here; I could see the charred remains of boxes and consoles, plastic melted and dripping.
But no bodies.
I walked upright, boots crunching on the burned litter, rifle cradled in my arms. Frede and a dozen other troopers were behind me, visors down, gloved fingers on the triggers of their rifles.
“You’d think they’d make their last stand down here,” Frede said.
I shook my head inside my helmet. “Not if they’re smart. They would have figured out that the fire rivers would all converge here and—”
Four camouflaged doors in the ceiling dropped open and dozens of spiders jumped down on us, firing, screeching weird high-pitched cries. One of them landed on my shoulders, heavy enough to buckle my knees and knock the rifle out of my hands. I saw a horrific set of mandibles snapping at my visor and felt a laser burn my arm. Grabbing at the spider, I yanked it away from me and smashed it against the cavern wall. Its hard shell took the shock, several of its arms sinking their barbs into the armored sleeve of my suit, another two firing pistols into my torso.
I staggered back, still clutching the thing by one of its barbed arms, and reached for the pistol at my hip. My right arm was badly burned, but I shut off the pain signals and yanked the pistol out of its holster. The Arachnoid tried to block me with one of its arms but I clubbed the arm away and fired into its clacking, snapping mouth. The beam sawed through the creature’s head and came out the other side, splashing against the wall.
Turning as it dropped away from me, I saw another spider clinging to a trooper with several arms and flicking the detonator of a grenade with one free claw. The explosion killed both of them and knocked the rest of us to the floor of the cavern.
With my senses in overdrive I fired at two more of the Arachnoids, pulled a third off Frede’s back and blew its head off, then swept half the cavern with the beam of my pistol.
The attack ended as suddenly as it had begun. Four of my troopers were on the ground, dead or dying. None of the spiders was left alive.
Through the suit radio I could hear Frede gulping for air.
“Thanks,” she gasped. “It was going to set off a grenade, I think.”
“Suicide fighters,” I said. “We won’t have any prisoners for the scientists to study.”
Frede laughed bitterly. “Tough shit,” she said.
I was able at last to tell the Tsihn admiral that Bititu was secure, after four days of intense battle. My casualties were nearly eighty percent. I myself was burned in the chest and right arm.
The admiral congratulated me, although its image in my visor showed no sign of pleasure or even of approval.
“The Hegemony has not seen fit to attempt to reinforce Bititu,” it complained. “My fleet has waited here for nothing.”
As we were being ferried back to the troopship I wondered why the Commonwealth thought this barren chunk of rock was important enough to kill hundreds of troopers. Apparently the Hegemony did not want to hold on to Bititu badly enough to send help to its Arachnoid garrison.
I shook my head wearily. Was there some real strategic meaning to this fighting, or was it all a game that the Creators were playing among themselves, using us and the other alien races we had encountered as pawns for their entertainment?
What difference did it make? Sitting there in the shuttle craft on the way back to the troopship, grimy and bloody and utterly exhausted, I did what all the other troopers were doing. I leaned my head back against the bulkhead and dozed off.
“It is not a game, Orion.”
The Golden One appeared before me, radiating light so blindingly bright that I had to shield my eyes with my aching, weary hands.
He seemed deadly serious, none of his usual mocking tone in his voice, his face somber, almost grim.
“The balance of forces in this war is tilting the wrong way,” Aten told me. “Anya and her ilk are slowly overcoming my Commonwealth.”
“But we took Bititu,” I protested, like a child seeking its father’s approval. “Isn’t that something?”
“Not enough,” he said. “The Hegemony did not go for my feint. The fleet waited, but the enemy did not step into the trap we had prepared for them.”
“Feint? All that killing was nothing more than a feint?”
“Not quite, Orion. A good strategist always has more than one objective in sight.” Some of Aten’s old haughty self-importance crept back into his expression. “The military aspect of your exertions did not pay the dividends I expected, but the political consequences may yet bear fruit.”
“What do you mean by that?” I asked.
He folded his arms across his chest. “You will see, in due time.”
I blinked and was back on the shuttle, amid my wounded, bone-tired, snoring troopers. The shuttle shuddered and thumped as it docked with the troopship, waking all but the most determined dozers.
“Home sweet home,” somebody cracked.
“You know,” said someone else, “that cryosleeper’s gonna look damned good to me.”
I frowned. Cryosleep? Is that what was in store for these troopers?
They let us rest for two whole days. The severely wounded were sent to sickbay while the rest of us were examined by medics, patched here and there, and allowed to return to our quarters. We slept, we ate and we slept some more.
On the third day we were handed dress uniforms and ordered to assemble in the ship’s biggest cargo bay. It had carried supplies and ammunition on the trip to Bititu; now it was empty. Human officers I had never seen before—all of them in magnificent spotless uniforms heavy with braid and decorations—put us through a marching drill and then paraded us around the big cargo bay to the tune of martial music piped in through the ship’s intercom.
They stood us at attention in front of a makeshift dais, and the human officers, together with a handful of Tsihn, made a series of speeches at us, praising our courage and loyalty. Even Brigadier Uxley was there, obviously reading his prepared speech from a screen built into the rostrum that he leaned upon. He had flown out from the sector base to rendezvous with us at one of our navigation points, where we slowed from superlight velocity for a few hours.
“They’re piping this ceremony back to Loris,” Frede whispered to me as we stood at attention through the long, boring speeches.
Loris. The Commonwealth’s capital planet, my memory told me. The only Earthlike planet of the Giotto system, 270 light-years from old Earth itself.
Then the Tsihn admiral read off a unit citation and handed out medals. It seemed like a miserably poor reward for such hard fighting, but the troopers were pitifully grateful for the recognition.
At the end of the ceremony Uxley smiled beamingly at us and announced, “You are relieved of all duties for the remainder of this trip back to sector base six. There you will be reassigned. Dismissed.”
Frede came up to me as the troop broke up into chatting, laughing little groups.
“Ready for some R and R?” she asked.
“Not much to do aboard this bucket,” I complained.
“We can grab some sack time.”
I caught the gleam in her eye. “For the whole trip back?”
Frede laughed. “That would be fun, Orion, but we’ve only got another twelve hours.”
Puzzled, I asked, “What do you mean? The commander said we’re relieved of all duties—”
“That means we’re going back into cryosleep,” Frede said, her tone sobering. “You don’t think they’re going to feed us the whole trip back, do you? A few watts of electricity to keep the nitrogen liquefied is a lot cheaper than having us underfoot.”
“But I thought—”
She gripped my arm, making me wince slightly.
“Oh, I’m sorry! I forgot your arm is still healing.”
“You mean that after all the fighting we’ve done they’re going to pop us back into the freezers?”
Frede gave me a sad smile. “We got a unit citation and individual medals and congratulations from the admiral. They beamed the ceremony back to the capital for all the civilians to see. We’re official heroes. What more can a trooper ask for?”
I shook my head. “I guess you’ve got to be born to it.”
“Yeah,” she said. “Come on, let’s make out while we’re still warm.”