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He smiled placidly. "Of course you won't respond at first; neither would I. This could be a trap. Feel free to investigate at long range. I am calling from a different portal planet. I'm currently 12.23 million kilometers from you, on the plane of the ecliptic, on an angle of 0.54 radians with respect to the collapsar. As you probably know by now.
"I am a descendant of the first Strike Force, nearly half a mille
We immediately got a high-resolution image of the portal planet. It was small, as they usually are; cold and airless except for the base. It was actually more like a town than a base, and it was as obvious as a beacon. It wasn't enclosed; air was evidently held in by some sort of force field. It was lit up by an artificial sun that floated a few kilometers above the surface.
There was an ancient cruiser in orbit, its dramatic sweeping streamlined grace putting our functional clunkiness to shame. There were also two Tauran vessels. None of them was obviously damaged.
All of us 5-and-above officers were on the bridge when we contacted the planet. Commodore Sidorenko sat up front with Garcia; he technically outranked her in this room, but it was her show, since the actual business was planetside.
I felt a little self-conscious, having come straight from the prep bay. Everyone else was in uniform; I was just wearing the contact net for the fighting suit. Like a layer of silver paint.
Garcia addressed the man in the chair. "Do you have a name and a rank?"
It took about forty seconds for the message to get to him, and another forty for his response: "My name is Man. We don't have ranks; I'm here because I can speak Old Standard. English."
You could play a slow chess game during this conversation, and not miss anything. "But your ancestors defeated the Taurans, somehow."
"No. The Taurans took them prisoner and set them up here. Then there was another battle, generations ago. We never heard from them again."
"But we lost that battle. Our cruiser was destroyed with all hands aboard."
"I don't know anything about that. Their planet was on the other side of the collapsar when the battle happened. The people here saw a lot of light, distorted by gravitational lensing. We always assumed it was some robotic assault, since we didn't hear anything from either side, afterwards. I'm sorry so many people died."
"What about the Taurans who were with you? Are there Taurans there now?"
"No; there weren't any then, and there aren't any now. Before the battle they showed up now and then."
"But there are-" she began.
"Oh, you mean the Tauran ships in orbit. They've been there for hundreds of years. So has our cruiser. We have no way to get to them. This place is self-sufficient, but a prison."
"I'll contact you again after I've spoken to my officers." The cube went dark.
Garcia swiveled around, and so did Sidorenko, who spoke for the first time: "I don't like it. He could be a simulation."
Garcia nodded. "That assumes a lot, though. And it would mean they know a hell of a lot more about us than we do about them."
"That's demonstrable. Four hundred years ago, they were supposedly able to build a place for the captives to stay. I don't believe we would have any trouble simulating a Tauran, given a couple of hundred captives and that much time for research."
"I suppose. Potter," she said to me, "go down and tell the fourth platoon there's a slight change of plans, but we're still going in ready for anything. I think the best thing we can do is get over there and make physical contact as soon as possible."
"Right," Sidorenko said. "We don't have the element of surprise anymore, but there's no percentage in sitting here and feeding them data, giving them time to revise their strategy. If there areTaurans there."
"Have your people prepped for five gees," Garcia said to me. "Get you there in a few hours."
"Eight," Sidorenko said. "We'll be about ten hours behind you."
"Wait in orbit?" I said, knowing the answer.
"You wish. Let's go down to the bay."
We had a holo of the base projected down there and worked out a simple strategy. Twenty-two of us in fighting suits, armed to the teeth, carrying a nova bomb and a stasis field, surround the place and politely knock on the door. Depending on the response, we either walk in for tea or level the place.
Getting there would not be so bad. Nobody could endure four hours of five-gee acceleration, then flip for four hours of deceleration, unprotected. So we'd be clamshelled in the fighting suits, knocked out and superhydrated. Eight hours of deep sleep and then maybe an hour to shake it off and go be a soldier. Or a guest for tea.
Cat and I made the rounds in the cramped fighter, seeing that everybody was in place, suit fittings and readouts in order. Then we shared a minute of private embrace and took our own places.
I jacked the fluid exchange into my hip fitting, and all of the fear went away. My body sagged with sweet lassitude, and I let the soft nozzle clasp my face. I was still aware enough to know that it was sucking all the air out of my lungs and then blowing in a dense replacement fluid, but all I felt was a long, low-key orgasm. I knew that this was the last thing a lot of people felt, the fighter blown to bits moments or hours later. But the war offered us many worse ways to die. I was sound asleep before the acceleration blasted us into space. Dreaming of being a fish in a warm and heavy sea.
-8-
The chemicals won't let you remember coming out of it, which is probably good. My diaphragm and esophagus were sore and tired from getting rid of all the fluid. Cat looked like hell and I stayed away from mirrors, while we toweled off and put on the contact nets and got back into the fighting suits for the landing.
Our strategy, such as it was, seemed even less appealing, this close to the portal planet. The two Tauran cruisers were old models, but they were a hundred times the size of our fighter, and since they were in synchronous orbit over the base, there was no way to avoid coming into range. But they did let us slide under them without blowing us out of the sky, which made Man's story more believable.
It was pretty obvious, though, that our primary job was to be a target, for those ships and the base. If we were a
When Morales said we were going to just go straight in and land on the strip beside the base, I muttered, "Might as well be hung for a sheep as a goat," and Cat, who was on my line, asked why anyone would hang a sheep. I told her it was hard to explain. In fact, it was just something my father used to say, and if he'd ever explained it, I'd forgotten.
The landing was loud but feather-light. We undamped our fighting suits from their transport positions and practiced walking in the one-third gee of the small planet. "They should've sent Goy," Cat said, which is what we called Chance Nguyen, the Martian. "He'd be right at home."
We moved out fast, people sprinting to their attack positions. Cat went off to the other side of the base. I was going with Morales, to knock on the door. Rank and its privileges. The first to die, or be offered tea.
The buildings on the base looked like they'd been designed by a careful child. Windowless blocks laid out on a grid. All but one were sand-colored. We walked to the silver cube of headquarters. At least it had "HQ" in big letters over the airlock.