“It is hard to be discreet when you weigh the better part of a ton.”
Sometimes, when they were alone for days or weeks on end, Lenna wished more than anything that Bill possessed the spontaneity to engage in real conversation. Then, on some rare occasion such as this, Bill would do his best, and Lenna was reminded that she was probably better off with a reticent robot.
She turned to survey the horizon to the west, knowing that the approach path of the freighter was to have left her due east of the base. She had no idea of the distance. The drop was to have been where some landform, such as the ridge several kilometers to the west, offered protection from scan and radar. Without any good maps of the planet, finding such a place as that had been entirely a matter of chance. They could be ten kilometers short of their target, or a thousand. If they could make their way to higher ground, then she could put Bill’s optical scanners and sensors to the task.
“Let’s be on with it, then,” she said, rapping affectionately on the sentry’s hull. “I’ve got to keep moving before I freeze.”
“I contain no material which could freeze at the predicted temperatures for this environment,” Bill offered for reasons that no one could begin to guess.
“Bully for you.”
Leading the way, Lenna started out across the ice field. This was going to be hard walking. She was really not cold because of the self-warming arctic gear; she never had to worry about freezing, as long as she had a spare set of fresh batteries to charge from Bill’s generator. But the loose snow and broken rock and ice would make for very rough going. She had grown up in a world that was as mountainous as it was wintry, although she had been an artist and a part-time pilot rather than a ranger in the wild. She was most worried about Bill, and what might happen if he fell over into a tight place. He was so heavily armored that he weighed quite a lot, and he had two sets of legs but no hands.
“It was a better plan than your first one,” Bill proffered after more than a minute of walking.
Lenna turned to stare at him. It took her a moment to realize just what he was talking about, their discussion of the stupidity of her plan for getting them down having been brief and some time past.
She shrugged, resuming their march. “I don’t see how it could have been worse. Riding in to our destination inside a missile and then parachuting down would hardly have been a rougher ride, as long as the parachute opened at the end. It would have saved us this long walk in.”
“I would not have fit inside a missile,” Bill explained in a voice that conveyed simple, patient logic.
“Oh, excuse me!”
“Would you like for me to shut up?”
“No, not at all. Who else would I have to talk to, out here in the middle of nowhere? I am at your mercy.” She paused, having seen a small movement in the snowfield just ahead. “What was that?”
“What was what?” Bill asked.
Lenna saw something move again, and pointed. “Look!”
“Look!” An entire course of small, high-pitched voices echoed her.
Lenna could have tripped over her own face, she was so surprised. She looked around, finding herself in the middle of a vast complex of small holes skillfully hidden in the ice. A considerable number of the holes held small, white-furred animals standing upright just above their burrows, peering at her with bright eyes and perked ears. They were about the size of a very small dog, certainly nothing for her to worry about. At least not as long as she had that walking battleship staring over her shoulder.
“What are those things?” Lenna asked quietly. All the information there was to be had on this planet had been downloaded into Bill’s secondary memory storage.
“Ice gophers,” the sentry explained simply, then seemed to shift gears. “Extensive colonies of ice gophers, numbering anywhere from less than a dozen to several hundred, are borrowed into the ice of glaciers and ice fields. The small but hardy pseudo-mammals are intelligent and gregarious, and are noted to be very curious and fearless. The members of the colony are in continual and apparently extensive vocal communication, defending their colonies through the diligence of constant sentries. Their most remarkable trait is their ability to mimic the sound of other animals, even complex speech, with truly amazing clarity.”
“Thus spake Zarathustra,” Lenna said under her breath. “Knowing our friends, they probably have an entire colony of vast proportions surrounding their damned base. Hello!”
“Hello!” several dozen ice gophers obligingly called back.
“Heigh-dee heigh-dee ho!”
“Heigh-dee heigh-dee ho!
“Heigh-dee heigh-dee hay!”
“Heigh-dee heigh-dee hay!”
“By the gods, what a feeling of power!” Lenna said to herself, then started forward again through the middle of the colony. “Take it, maestro!”
“Hey heigh-dee heigh-dee, heigh-dee hay a gopher hole!” Bill roared in a deep, gravelly voice as he followed, his massive hull seeming to sway in time with the rhythm. He was a machine of many unique talents, but music was not one of them.
The first hint Lenna had that they were anywhere near the base was when the small patrol ship came over the top of the hill to their left, moving quickly to intercept them. She recognized the ship immediately as a hover tank, a fairly standard type used by the Union in rugged terrain, part attack craft with powerful weapons and part transport. It could fly like a real aircraft for covering rough ground, although it usually hovered just over the surface on a form of field drive to save power. It could even float, although such a function was of little use in this place.
The tank settled to the ice a short distance away and the main hatch opened, dropping down to form a boarding ramp. Lenna waited patiently while a pair of soldiers in environmental suits like her own stepped out.
“What are you doing out here?” the apparent leader of the pair asked. At least he asked in the calm, almost bored voice of someone who expected a perfectly reasonable answer. After all, Lenna was dressed as one of their own and walking about this disgruntled countryside with a sentry. She relaxed.
“Performing cold-weather exercises on this experimental model,” she explained, indicating Bill. He bent one foreleg and nodded. “We were flying along when something came up behind us in a hurry and blasted us good.”
“Must have been that rebel freighter that made that laughable pass at the base three days ago,” the second of the two offered.
“I imagine so, considering the fact that you’ve been walking due west along its approach,” the first one agreed. “Why don’t we give you a ride in, as much as that might seem like better late than never.”
“How far are we from the base?” Lenna asked as she directed Bill into the rear portion of the tank.
“Oh, it’s just over that next hill, not more than a kilometer away.”
There was certainly something to be said about being delivered to the front door, although she was just as glad that they had not found her before this. As it was, it seemed likely that she would be allowed to simply disappear inside the base as soon as they arrived. Otherwise, after finding her in the middle of the frozen nowhere, there would have been too much time to wonder about her, perhaps even to test her identity to greater depth than her forged idents could endure.
The base was sprawled across the icefield that filled the wide, circular depression of a valley that appeared to be the better part of fifty kilometers across, although only the tops of a few mostly-buried buildings broke through the surface of the snow in widely-scattered clumps. Very little information existed about this base, and no photographs. Lenna was not surprised to find that the largest part of the complex was actually deep underground, in the zone of constant temperatures and therefore sheltered from the deadly cold of the winter storms.
The tank cut a straight path across the ice to the nearest of many long, featureless buildings. The massive metal door opened at their approach, revealing a long, steep ramp descending into the depths. Lenna watched with interest as they descended beneath the relatively thin lens of ice that filled the shallow, valley floor, down within the rock itself. Even the Union knew better than to build something that might be expected to last for centuries in the ice itself, which had a disconcerting habit of moving and cracking, as well as simply accumulating and then disappearing altogether over long periods of time.
They arrived at last in a type of underground garage, where some two dozen hover tanks were parked, with empty stalls for several more. The ceiling seemed a little low, at least to Lenna. She thought that she would have felt just a little nervous in trying to guide a tank through this enclosed space, since the machines had no wheels and were obliged to float about a meter off the ground. There seemed to be about three meters of clearance over the roofs of the parked tanks. Considering how massive they were, that was cutting it just a little close.
Her own tank settled to the floor and the main hatch began to fold down, although the two soldiers remained seated in the forward cabin. The leader turned to look at her.
“This is patrol depot three,” he explained briefly. “We have to go back out on duty, so we’ll just let you out here. The tram station is through that passage on the far side of the chamber.”
“We’re on the eastern perimeter?” Lenna asked, sending Bill on through the narrow hatch.
He nodded. “This is the main complex, of course. Hangars for the supply ships and the mock wolves are on the far side of the western ridge.”
Lenna was so surprised by that unexpected lead that she almost forgot to tender the appropriate thanks and farewells as she followed Bill out the hatch. The tank rose and moved away, accelerating up the long ramp back to the surface. Lenna hardly even noticed as she walked absently across the garage toward the tram station, while Bill followed loyally behind.
Things seemed to be going about as well as she had any right to expect. First she was delivered right inside the base itself, without the need to bluff her way through security, and then she was given the lead she needed to begin her search. Apparently the vague hints were perfectly true. The Union was developing a new form of missile or automated fighter that employed highspeed artificial intelligence to outfly the Starwolves, a highly advanced variant of the old Wolfhound missiles that had been used to limited effect in the past.
“Get a move on,” Bill told her softly. “You might attract attention to yourself, shuffling about like that.”
“All right. You just keep your shell on,” Lenna answered softly. “What’s your problem? You have a short in your patience chip?”
“What do we do now?” he asked, his usual practical and unperturbed self.