The Apocalypse Troll

His voice trailed off and he shook his head, and Morris wiped sweat from his face silently. It was sweltering in Aston's command trailer, and his own elation had dimmed as the admiral took him step-by-step, remorselessly, through their meager data. The information represented a tremendous breakthrough-the first real break they'd had-but Dick was right. Morris admitted it unhappily, but he admitted it. He and Wilkins had been too exhilarated to look for difficulties, but Aston was a professional's professional. He knew that Murphy's was the first law of military operations.

The intelligence officer sighed and ran fingers through his sweaty hair, frowning as he, too, stared down at the map. Now he understood why Loren had seemed less euphoric than the FBI director and himself. The CIA man's ex-Ranger background meant he was more accustomed to operations mounted in trackless wilderness without street signs, and he'd seen more clearly what Aston faced.

Still, they knew roughly where he was... .

"If large-scale searches are out, what about small ground parties of Troll-proof recon troops?" he asked finally.

"That may be the way we have to go." Aston sighed. "And we've been training for just that, but I'd hoped to avoid it. That's a damned big area, and we've only got so many men, Mordecai. Besides, if we send people in on the ground, Grendel's likely to spot them before they spot him, especially if he's well hidden. If he does, they won't have the firepower to stop him. They can't-not if they're supposed to be unobtrusive. So if there's hard contact between us and him, we're going to lose a lot of people and he'll probably bug out before we can get the main force in place."

"All right," Morris said, "suppose we set up an air umbrella before you go in? A squadron of F-16s from Shaw-or, better yet, F-15s from Langley-could fly top cover and nail him if he took off, couldn't they?"

"I don't know," Aston said thoughtfully. "Milla?"

"It's worth trying," she said slowly, "but he's faster than anything we've got, and he can accelerate faster, too. With a small start, he could simply outrun your missiles, and his antimissile systems are pretty good, as well. Then, too, he'd have an excellent chance of fighting his way through several dozen of your best fighters head-to-head-unless you arm them with nukes. And with chemical warheads, you'd have to use heavy surface-to-air missiles to do him much damage, because your air-to-air missiles just don't pack enough punch."

"Their SAM versions knocked down his wingmen," Morris pointed out.

"True, but you fired hundreds of them." She wiped her damp forehead, and Morris hid a grin. At least her symbiote didn't keep her from sweating. "And the real reason they worked wasn't their power but the tactical situation. They took the Kangas-and Grendel-by surprise, because none of them expected any threat from such primitive technology. Even then, they wouldn't have worked if they hadn't been moving at such high velocity that their drive fields were all focused forward and couldn't interdict. Not to mention the way atmospheric friction tore them apart once their hull integrity was breached." She shook her head. "No, it's going to take something at least as heavy as a Patriot to damage his hull significantly, assuming he's not configured to interdict. And, frankly, your SAMs would be dead meat against his active defenses unless we can fire enough to saturate his tracking capability."

"And we don't happen to have a couple of dozen Patriot batteries already in the area," Aston pointed out to Morris. "Which means we can't count on taking him out once he gets airborne even if he hasn't come up with some way to screw our tracking systems over. We've got to catch him on the ground, someplace we can close in with enough heavy weapons to deal with his mechs and catch him on take off, when his drive field can't interdict."

Morris nodded, his expression unhappy. Ludmilla had briefed them all on the Troll's flight systems. Fighters didn't mount battle screen because they used their n-drives to intercept incoming weapons, but the Troll couldn't configure his drive field to do that until he was at least a hundred meters off the ground. Up to that point, he could be hit-assuming they got through his active defenses-but the window would be only seconds wide.

"More to the point, perhaps," Aston went on, "we're all agreed that we're only going to get one clean shot at him-if we're lucky. Once he knows we're on to him, he'll redouble his security measures, at the very least; at worst, he'll go for the quick kill and simply blow the planet up. So we have to catch him when he's vulnerable, and to do that, we have to know where he is. Which is only another way of saying that we can't search for him without risking alerting him, but that we've got to know where he is before we warn him in any other way."

"Maybe." Ludmilla licked sweat from her upper lip and ran her fingertip over the mountainous terrain, frowning. "I know we'd hoped for some sort of physical sighting, but this may actually be better. He must be pretty well hidden-probably underground; they like that-and we haven't had any search activity in the area. So he must know we haven't spotted him, and when we do turn up, he's going to spend a few minutes wondering why we're there."

"Which would be all very well if we knew where he was," Aston objected, but his face was intent, as if he sensed some thought working itself out behind her eyes.

"Maybe we can figure that out," she said softly, turning to Morris. "Mordecai, is there any sort of aircraft which would normally fly something remotely like a search pattern in that area?"

"Hm?" Morris thought for a moment, frowning, but it was Abernathy who provided the answer.

"Sure," he said. "Forestry Service planes buzz around the national forests and parks all the time." Morris and Aston looked at him with surprised respect, and he chuckled. "Hey, I'm a California boy. I grew up in the San Joaquin Valley-little place named Exeter, just below Sequoia National Park. They do surveys, aerial mapping, hunt for pot growers, watch for forest fires, all that sort of thing."

"Yes, they do," Morris said slowly, "and the Southeast's been dry again this year. I bet they're keeping a real close fire-watch."

"Good." Ludmilla looked at Aston. "I've half-expected something like this. That's why I was so glad to get my flight suit back together."

"Why?" he asked tensely.

"Because the sensies work. I can wear it and ride around in one of these Forestry Service planes. Even if he's buried himself, he'll have set up detection posts. Why not? Your technology wouldn't even recognize one of his scan beams."

"But yours will," he said flatly, and frowned when she nodded. "No, Milla. We need you to handle your blaster. I let you talk me into jump school because we might have to go in by chute, but if you go mucking around up there with twenty-fifth century technology and he spots you-"

"I'll use passive systems," she said calmly. "Everything else will be powered down to a shielded trickle charge. He'd have to be within a hundred meters to pick that up, and that's assuming he knew to look for them in the first place. Which he won't, because I'm 'dead,' right?"

"Just so you don't get that way for real." He tried to speak lightly, but she heard personal as well as professional concern in his voice, and her eyes smiled at him.

"All right," he said after a moment, "how close can you pin him down?"

"Well, with a little luck I can place his sca

"All right," he sighed again, after a long, silent moment. "I don't like it, but I don't see any way around it, either. So where do you think he is?"