She spoke right up. “We only have one immediate option, Marcus. It’s out of our hands now. We have to tell the President.”
“Negative,” he said crisply. “You don’t seem to understand. We’ve screwed up. We’re the ones who’re supposed to provide intelligence ahead of time, and we didn’t do it. I’m not telling the President anything until I can tell him what we can do to fix it! We’re going to sit right here until we have a plan.” He gave me a look. “You, Dannerman; you know what the subs are like. What’s wrong with sending out antisubmarine ships with depth charges to take every one of them out?”
He took me by surprise, and I gave him a knee-jerk response. “No! Those things are full of innocent people! It’s the Scarecrows on the scout ship that make them run the subs!”
He overrode me. “Screw the innocent freaks! I’m not going to jeopardize the world’s safety for a bunch of space weirdos! Hilda! Get me the Combined Chiefs right now, conference call. Wake them up if you have to.”
“Hey,” I said. “Wait a minute.”
Marcus Pell was as tired as I was, and probably even more frazzled. It was not a good time to be getting in his hair. Staring at me in a way that promised no kindness, he took a deep breath before he spoke. “I understand your concern for these animals on the subs. I don’t want to hear about it again.”
“Then listen to some common sense,” I said. “It can’t be done. You can’t locate the subs except in general terms, from what the board in our sub shows, and there are twenty-five of them. If you’re lucky enough to hit one, what do you think the other twenty-four will be doing?”
“Ah,” he said. “I see.” He thought for a moment. Then, “You successfully invaded one sub. Could we use that transit machine thing to do the same with the others?”
Hilda answered for me. “Same problem, Marcus. There are twenty-five of them. If we were real lucky, we might get two or three before the others fired off their whatever it is they fire. No, Marcus. We can’t take them out one at a time. We have to go after the scout ship.”
The deputy director suddenly came to life. “Hell, yes!” he cried, excited for the first time. “That could work! A couple of those armed spacecraft are pretty close to ready. We send them off to the scout ship, blow it out of space-“
“Marcus,” Hilda said, “when the Scarecrows see those ships coming at them, what do you think they would do?”
“Oh,” he said. “Hell. Then we send a commando through that transit machine, same as you did for the sub. Tough men, heavily armed, they come out of that thing shooting. When you strike at the snake’s head you don’t have to worry about the rest of the animal. Right, Dannerman?”
I hated to pour cold water on him, but I didn’t have a choice. “I don’t think it would work,” I said. “When we hit the one sub we had four Horch fighting machines, and we were only up against two Scarecrow warriors and a couple of Docs-and even so, they put up a hell of a fight. I’d guess there’d be more in the scout ship, and they’d probably be watching the transit machines pretty closely.”
“Expecting us to attack?”
“More likely expecting the Horch, but it’d come out to the same thing.”
Hilda spoke up then. “There is one alternative,” she said. “Instead of sending them a raiding party, what would happen if we send a bomb?”
The deputy director was frowning.
“But that leaves all the subs still in place. Wouldn’t they just push their buttons and start the methane release?”
He was looking at me. “Maybe not,” I said cautiously. “If the scout ship was destroyed, the crews wouldn’t be controlled anymore-except for the Dopeys. But we could get Pirraghiz on the horn to talk to them all, and they’d deal with their Dopeys. The others all hate the Scarecrows too, you know.”
“So that’s it,” Hilda said. “We bomb the scout ship.”
I found myself instinctively arguing against that one, too. “I don’t think so, Hilda. We don’t know how big the scout ship is, or how well bulkheaded. And there’s a limit to the amount of mass the transit machine can handle at one time. A few hundred kilograms, maybe. And-“
I stopped. Hilda wasn’t listening to me. As far as I could tell, her eyes were on the deputy director.
Who was looking at her with a considering expression I hadn’t seen before. “You aren’t thinking of chemical explosives, are you, Brigadier Morrisey?” he said.
That startled me. “Come on, Hilda,” I said, “what’re you talking about? Nukes? But they’ve been outlawed all over the world, ever since some of the terrorists got their hands on a couple.”
She said reasonably, “Shut up, Danno.” She waited for a moment to see if the deputy director was going to say anything else. When he didn’t, she went on. “I’ve been hearing these rumors for years, Marcus. Latrine gossip. About how some nations have been cheating on the nuclear disarmament treaties, maybe stashed away a few little backpack-sized ones, just in case. Have you heard those stories, too?”
He stared at her tight-faced. Then he sighed. “Shit,” he said.
“You don’t have any idea how much trouble this is going to make.”
“More trouble than being exterminated, Marcus?” she asked politely.
He passed a hand over his face. “All right,” he said. “Let me go talk to the President.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR
Things went fast then. I don’t know who the President gave orders to, or what the orders were, but by the time I was back in the sub, telling Pirraghiz what she would have to do about talking to the other sub crews, the word came. A special jet from some installation in Amarillo, Texas, would be arriving in two hours with “the materiel that was requisitioned.” Nothing more specific than that, but I knew what that materiel was going to be.
