The general wanted to see her the next morning.
He was waiting outside when Gromon brought her to Battle Headquarters, the only solid building Gweanvin was to see on Jopat. Constructed of meltstone, it had feet-thick walls and roof that were obviously flareproof.
Gromon and a few other staff officers stood around grinning as Spart Dargow glared disapproval at the slim shorts-and-haltered figure. Gweanvin glared back with cool disdain. Dargow was a seven-footer, several inches taller than the barb average, a middle-aged man of perhaps sixty-five whose hair and beard were grayshot.
"You look the same as when I last saw you, and that was a good seven years back," he growled. "When are you going to become a woman?"
She made a gesture of indifference. She was well aware of the striking contrast between herself and the normal woman of twenty-seven E-years. But she had never found the contrast disturbing. "Who knows?" she said. "Maybe never, like some boneheads I know whose brains never develop."
His reaction to the verbal jab was minimal. "I recall somebody describing you," he said, "as fifty-five pounds of brass and fifty-five pounds of viper venom. I see that hasn't changed, either."
"Right. I still weigh one hundred and ten," she replied.
Dargow's frown deepened, and his emo slowly shifted from disapproval to curiosity. Gweanvin knew what he was trying to do—understand her well enough to categorize her, and thus discover how to deal with her.
"I keep thinking," he finally muttered, "that you must be the victim of an incompetent psych-release, but that doesn't hold up. And I never heard of a physical deficiency the docs can't handle. Just what the hell is it with you, girl?"
Ask a polite question and get a polite answer, thought Gweanvin. "The physiologists tell me I'm a mutant, with a characteristic of late physical maturity."
"Oh . . . any more like you around?"
"I don't know of any yet."
"And I guess you won't ever," he grumbled. "That's a damn-fool mutation if I ever heard of one. Late maturity gives you too many chances to get killed before you breed. Especially if you go around frontlining like a wild morimet or something! Now, we genetic barbarians breed early—"
"And often," Gweanvin inserted.
"We're high-survival," he went on, "but unless you get your skinny rump home, and settle down behind a nice safe pencil till you're ready to have kids, your genetic line is going to be awful short."
Gweanvin shrugged. "Crap," she sniffed.
"Good sense," the general retorted angrily.
"Where's the good sense of trying to perpetuate a strain so low-survival that it needs that kind of protecting?" she countered. "If I don't have enough survival abilities to do the things I want to do, and still stay alive to have babies some day, to hell with my genetic line."
Dargow snorted. "You think you got those survival abilities?"
"I think I'll be around to spit in your vapor, general."
"Lots of luck!" he snapped. "Now, what's this about you trying to talk us into returning to the Commonality?"
"I'm not. The doctrinists used every conceivable argument to try to get some reason through your thick skulls, and they failed. So I'm not trying to talk anybody into anything."
"You are here to get us to go back, though."
"Right."
"And you don't know how you'll go about it?"
"Right again."
Dargow grunted an obscenity. "Maybe I ought to find that funny, but I don't like it a damned bit."
Gweanvin's eyes widened. This was a favorable development she had not anticipated. Plainly, Dargow could not counter her play if he did not know her game. And he could not force her to tell it, because she did not know it herself.
"I've changed my mind about making you leave Jopat this morning," he said after a pause. "The more convinced the pencil-pushers become that we're here to stay, despite any tricks they try to pull, the better for everybody. If I made you leave, they'd think you had us worried, unsure of ourselves. So stick around as long as you like—but try to stay out from underfoot."
"Thanks, general," she replied. "Since I'm at loose ends right now, as far as my mission is concerned, I may as well participate in this little game you and the Lonnie barbs are playing. I'm not much on teamwork, since I usually operate alone, but—"
"You want to fight the Lonnies?" gasped the general.
"Why not?" she demanded. "They're the enemies of Prima Gran, aren't they? They would kill me if they could. Besides, I don't relish spending my time gossiping with your camp followers. And if I'm in the fight, maybe I can cut the number of you boneheads who get killed before I figure out how to make you come home. How about it?"
"You're on! Gromon, Green-Ten has lost a couple of snipers lately. Take this recruit over to Green Camp and tell Dak Surants she's his new man."
* * *
Two days later Gweanvin was approaching her first battle station, on or nearly on Jopat's equator. The jungle was slightly less dense than a typical rain-forest because Jopat has fifteen percent less than typical E-world moisture. And as she flitted through the tree trunks and hanging vines on semi-inert, Gweanvin passed through several flare-burned clearings in various stages of regrowth, evidence that there had been plenty of shooting in the area although it was not a favorite battle zone.
A mile and a half short of her assigned spot, she dropped to the ground, went inert, and reported in.
"Rocket to Axe."
"Axe here, Rocket," responded Dak Surants' voice.
"Rocket in place," she reported. "Oke and out."
She had wondered if Surants would challenge her "in place" claim when she was obviously short of her assigned position. He had not, but probably he would raise hell about it later.
But Gweanvin had worked under cover entirely too much to start taking damn-fool risks in the manner of the careless and rather lazy barbs. She had no intention of doing a semi-inert flit all the way to her post. Functioning transport implants, with their high power-drain, were too easily detected. She meant to walk the rest of the way with power packs at minimal output.
And walk it she did, in less than thirty minutes, using no life-support other than a tight shieldscreen to ward off the brambles she shoved through and to provide necessary air-conditioning against the heat. On enemy detectors she would be little more noticeable than a large native animal stomping through the undergrowth.
When she reached her assigned spot she climbed into the highest, sturdiest tree she could locate—still moving under muscle-power alone—and found a concealed perch. Then she settled down to wait for action.
She drew her zerburst pistol and studied its settings thoughtfully. The gun was basically a laser projector, the characteristics of its lance and flare governed principally by the intensity of the beam. At lowest intensity it produced a lance which never flared—merely a bolt of monochromatic light. That bolt would punch through the hardest shieldscreen as if it were not there and drill deeply into whatever flesh, stone or metal it struck.
But above a certain intensity threshold, so high that the light-energy took on aspects of mass, relativistic effects came into play. The front end of the lance propagated at normal light-velocity for the medium through which it was traveling. Because its concentration was such as to make it behave like mass, however, it underwent spacetime contraction, this effect increasing in magnitude from the front end of the lance to the rear. The net result was that the rear portions of the lance propagated progressively faster than the speed of light. That caused the lance to telescope in upon itself until, at flarepoint, its length came so close to zero, and its raving energy so closely confined, as to constitute a time-space "singularity"—an unsustainable state. So it flared, releasing nearly all the energy of the entire lance at one point and in one tiny fraction of a nanosecond.
The higher the intensity of laser beam fired, the more quickly it would flare. Maximum practical flare range was about two million miles—a very weak flare—and minimum was a mile and a quarter. At that short range the gunner ran a real risk of getting a bad case of sunburn from his own flare.
All in all, the zerburst pistol was an excellent weapon for Guardsmen, operating in space but in the near vicinity of their planet. But for ground-fighting or aerial combat? "Lousy," Gweanvin muttered to herself.
She realized she could not argue with her weapon, even though she could think of three other types of handguns she had used in the past that would be preferable in her present situation. The point was that the zerburst gun was the weapon of the Guardsmen. It was their baby. And of course they would not consider using anything else in their private little war on Jopat.
She turned the beam down to low, non-flaring intensity, with maximum-duration lance. She could change it back quickly if she spotted Lonnies stupid enough to be bunched so that a flare could catch several. Otherwise, she would rely on the accuracy of her aim to drill—maybe slash—any singletons she spotted.
Jopat's sun climbed higher in the sky. And higher. It was overhead. It crept lower. And lower.
A helluva lousy way to play a game, fumed Gweanvin. It dawned on her that there might not be any action at all in her sector that day. Or the following day.
But she had agreed to play by the barbs' rules. That meant she did not desert her post, no matter how little action came her way.
It was midafternoon before she heard Dak Surants snap: "Motor through Target, ho the fox!"
That meant someone had spotted enemy elements approaching the line on which she was posted. Probably forward scouts on anti-sniper patrol, she guessed. Such deployment was a standard opening move, according to what she had been told.
She killed her shieldscreen and gasped when the sullen heat of the jungle, no longer held at bay, hit her like a blow. But detectable power usage was now down to the barely perceptible trickle required for sense amplification and emo-monitoring. Until she used her gun, an enemy would have to look at her to know she was there.
Minutes later she detected a Lonnie advancing on a line that would take him through the trees a thousand yards to her left.
The incautious speed of his advance indicated that he was not really expecting opposition here. Gweanvin guessed that, as she had hoped, Lonnie observers had pinpointed her at the spot a mile and a half north where she had made her last comm transmission and switched off her transport implants. The passing Lonnie seemed to be making for that spot.
She let him go by.
Less than a minute later three more Lonnies came into detection, well spread out, following the lead man. None would pass within feet of her, so as to actually be visible through the curtains of foliage. But all would pass within reasonable range for detection-aiming.
They arrived abreast of her. She blazed away with the zerburst gun, first to the left, where two of the barbs were passing, then to the right, her lances of light stoom-stooming through the air and vegetation in tight patterns that riddled the vague detection images of the enemy barbs.
Without pause, she flicked into semi-inert mode just long enough to streak down from her perch. Before touching ground she had returned her comm to the frequency Lonnie patrols were using. She caught the garbled but identical reports made by two of the downed men. From the third came only silence. Conclusion: two wounded, one dead.
She was running northward. Her perch would no longer be tenable, of course. For several seconds, vapor trails marking the passage of her zerburst lances would hang whitely in the air, pointing telltale fingers back to their source point for any aerial observer to see—and as soon as the nearest wounded Lonnie could move himself to a safe distance, that tree would be the target for a Lonnie flare.
And that lead Lonnie—the one supposed to have drawn her fire—was up ahead somewhere. She didn't like the idea of leaving him to her north while she was looking for action from the south. He just might try to sneak back on her . . .
He did. Almost, but not quite, as cautious as she, he was coming through the concealing ground growth toward her, his transport implants off. But his shieldscreen was on, while Gweanvin was suffering unprotected the stings, scratches and heat of her jungle run.
She halted when she detected him, aimed her gun, and stood puffing while she waited for him to emerge into visual contact. When he did . . .
"Hi!" she chirped. He had an instant in which to view her grin before she lanced him through the brain.
Immediately she activated her shieldscreen, and with only seconds to spare before the expected flare erupted back at her vigil tree. The airblast bounced her around for a moment.
"Axe to Rocket, report," Surants' voice demanded.
She was up and flitting hurriedly toward the spot of the flare, taking advantage of the detection-jamming miasma of ionization from induced radioactivity that would hang over the spot for several seconds.
She tongued her toothmike. "Two Lonnies killed, two wounded. Out."
"You're drawing the crowd. Out." replied Surants.
Which meant that the ruckus she had stirred up was going to make her the focus of the coming battle. That was often the way the barb battles developed—each side pouring forces into the scene of the hottest action.
The Lonnies would be eager to blast the Granny sniper who had so quickly disposed of an entire anti-sniper patrol.
She dived into the small crater now marking the site of the tree in which she had perched, and went full inert. The backwind had littered the ground with smoldering embers so she had to keep up her shieldscreen. Tumbling to the deepest, most sheltered position the hole offered, she halted in a crouch, peering up through the drifting smoke with zerburst gun held ready. She had switched it to flare intensity, range tentatively set at a mile and a half.
Ten seconds, fifteen seconds . . . Lances appeared, three of them simultaneously, foreshortened because they were aimed close to her position. Gweanvin upped her gun's range to three miles and fired back at the source of one lance before glare and flying debris and hard gusts of superheated air made aiming impossible. Her crater was now the center of a pattern of four craters—then of six, then of eight, as two of the aerial gunners fired again and again.
Rocks and dust, tree trunks and splinters—chunks of debris of all shapes and sizes—were raining down on her. Impatiently she maintained her crouch, protected by the shieldscreen, and waited for the worst of the deluge to end so she could jump over to one of the newer and therefore safer holes.
But when the stuff stopped falling, she was completely buried in it . . . a good fifteen feet deep! Her hole was now a mound slammed together by the pattern of surrounding blasts, and she was under it. She cursed.
Not that she couldn't get out. That would be easy enough. But in so doing she would use so much power as to draw the fire of every Lonnie within range. She was effectively immobilized.
And outside the battle was getting hot. She could detect it fuzzily through the junk piled on top of her.
"Axe to Rocket!" came the concerned voice of Surants.
"Oh, shut up," she said crossly, then hit him with a string of utterly blue vulgarities, making clear her total disdain for this simple-minded and primitively pointless little war game.
"Glad you're in one piece, Rocket." he responded lamely.
"Go take a barbed-wire enema, you anachronism. Out!" She settled down to wait out the battle, mindful that the wait might end any instant if a stray flare caught her mound, but not fretting about the possibility.