Tactical Error Read online

  Lenna rolled the freighter through a long evasive turn, knowing when she started that she would end up with the stingship still squarely on her tail. This part was the window dressing, building false confidence in an opponent who was obviously not particularly experienced. Under other circumstances, her evasive tactics would have been the best that anyone could have done. This freighter did not have the high-intensity acceleration dampers of a stingship, nor did she have the special acceleration suits or padded flight cradle the enemy pilots enjoyed. But the Union pilot would not suspect that she was a Trader, able to take harder turns than he could despite all of his protections.

  She continued to lead the stingship in, feigning just enough helplessness to lure the enemy close before he fired, sure of his kill. She waited as long as she dared, then activated her program modifications to the control system and gave the main drives full power. Following the automatic commands she had set, the computer control also engaged the stardrive at very low power, just enough to give their thrust a firm boost.

  The freighter catapulted forward, and Lenna lead the ship through a torturing 60-G turn. Its spaceframe groaned aloud as the ship bucked and shook, protesting the sharp change of direction. Lenna had to fight the pain and crushing forces herself, without the aid of the armored suit that usually supported her through harsh accelerations in her own fighter. She could only hope that her two companions had survived, facing G’s that humans never should have taken unprotected. Even stingships did not attempt this.

  She looped the freighter completely over, coming up behind the stingship and catching the enemy pilot by surprise just long enough for Lenna to lock the missile tracking system on target. Perhaps the stingship’s pilot never thought he should have anything to fear from a freighter, even after that last surprising move. He had only just begun to accelerate away almost casually when Lenna released her first missile. Carried by a small drive that would quickly burn itself out with its own power, the missile found its target in a matter of seconds.

  Sure of her prey, Lenna did not even wait to see. She had to get the freighter within the planetary atmosphere before they were intercepted by another stingship. She brought the ship back on course, keeping their speed as high as she dared until she was forced to decelerate rapidly. With no time to spare to orbit in, she guided the ship straight in at a sharp angle as she continued to cut their speed, retracting the missile carriage and bringing the atmospheric shields to full. It was only when the freighter entered the atmosphere, wrapped in a shell of thin flame, that she finally leveled off to an acceptable attitude for entry.

  By that time, the two regular crewmembers were beginning to recover from their rough handling. Lenna glanced at the captain quickly. “Do you think that you can take over? I need to get Bill and myself packed away.”

  “Yes. Right.” He released his straps and pulled himself from the copilot’s seat, moving with exaggerated care. Lenna knew that he would be regretting it far more tomorrow. She just hoped that he would be doing better by the time they began their attack run.

  Lenna relinquished her seat and hurried to the rear cargo hold, cramped with the heavy, white form of the ejection module. Bill, the sentry, was already inside, securely strapped down in his own impact cradle. He was in fact an armored security automaton of Union construction, commandeered for her use by the Starwolves during her first mission and later modified to suit her more demanding needs. In form he was a great, white, armored bulk standing on four solid legs, now retracted beneath him, his small head dominated by a battery of guns and a pair of small camera pods behind protective flanges. Loyalty and firepower were his strong points, but he was still an exceedingly stupid machine compared to the sentient Starwolf carriers. Lenna climbed inside the module and secured the hatch, then strapped herself into the single acceleration couch. Then she settled in to wait.

  The little freighter had continued its approach unopposed, having dropped down to within a hundred meters of the surface and holding at twice the speed of sound. According to the original plan, she was to hold a much greater speed at an even lower altitude, but her captain was still reeling under the effects of Lenna’s evasive tactics and he did not trust his ability to fly this ship, and it had not had a functional low-level attack guidance system in years. The extra altitude would also give Lenna and Bill a better chance of surviving when they went overboard.

  Just as the freighter was coming up on a hundred kilometers short of her target, the missile cradle was extended again. This time, however, both the forward and rear cargo bays were opened. The ship had been trans versing a desolate world, a rocky, mountainous land cut by vast glaciers and immense plains of ice and snow.

  Coming up behind one high, narrow ridge, the freighter dropped down as low as her captain dared to take her behind that wall of rock, hidden from radar and quite possibly from scan as well. The small white and gray shape of the ejection module popped out of the rear cargo hold. A tiny drogue chute, white as snow, snapped out almost immediately. Too small to break its fall, it was meant only to keep the module upright and to control its descent at a rate meant to get it grounded as quickly as possible.

  It hit the ground like a meteor, nearly burying itself in the snow and ice. The freighter had already disappeared over the horizon, continuing its run. Just as the sprawling surface portions of the secret base became visible twenty kilometers ahead, it released three of its remaining missiles in rapid succession, too far short of its destination for the weapons to have locked on target. The freighter turned immediately and shot away, climbing back out of the atmosphere and the safety of open space. It was meant to seem an act of cowardice and desperation, a rebel attack run aborted because of fear and bad judgment. Such things happened from time to time, sometimes successfully but most often not. But the real goal of that feign had been accomplished. Two passengers had been safely delivered.

  At that moment, Lenna knew that she had been delivered but she would have debated any mention of the word safely. She was beginning to have some understanding for the two circumspect pilots she had tried to assassinate with a good, tight turn. The ejection module, adapted from a small escape pod, had been built with its two unusual passengers in mind. Lenna could walk away from impacts that would have left ordinary humans dead or badly injured. Bill had, of course, been built to very demanding specifications, at least by Union standards. The replacement of many of his vital components, especially his brain and other electronics, with constructed parts had made him especially durable.

  Lenna glanced about. The lights were still on and there were no icy drafts at her back, so it seemed that the module had survived the one brief, dramatic journey of its career. Bill was still folded away in his own shock-absorbing cradle, his armored head and camera pods rotated around to watch her. He said nothing. He was obviously his usual charming self; Lenna saw no reason to be worried about him.

  “You want to go for a walk?” she asked.

  “Baby, it’s cold outside,” Bill answered obliquely; heaven alone knew what he had in mind by that response.

  “Why don’t we find out how cold,” she said as she began unstrapping from her seat.

  At least she maintained the good sense to get everything ready before she opened the hatch. As a part of her usual procedure, she was dressed in a Union officer’s uniform complete with arctic survival gear, weapons, and forged identities that were good enough to survive even a computer check. Starwolves knew quite a lot of interesting tricks, including magnetic strips on identity cards that told the computer reading the card that it knew her.

  Ready at last, she released the hatch and threw her packs outside before following herself. Getting Bill out of a hatch that was three sizes too small was quite another matter, especially now that the module was no longer resting completely level. The sentry was in fact surprisingly agile, his reflexes faster even than her own, but he always moved with exaggerated slowness and deliberation in enclosed spaces. Lenna had never figured out whether that
was a function programmed into him or an acquired idiosyncracy. He had collected a few in the course of his existence.

  “You know, that was an exceedingly stupid idea,” Lenna remarked as she stretched. All of her bones felt as if they had been rammed together.

  “It was your exceedingly stupid idea,” Bill reminded her with the perfect honesty that came from perfect innocence.

  Lenna frowned as she began tossing her packs over his back. “You never have learned the meaning of discretion.”

  “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.