Our ship joined a sizable battle fleet of cruisers and dreadnoughts. The plan was to make the run to the Jilbert system at superlight velocity, so we could not be detected until the very last moment, when we slowed to relativistic speed. Navigation was going to be tricky, but the Tsihn admiral assured me that they could get us to within a few light-hours of Jilbert.
“In that way,” it told me at one of our conferences in its quarters, “the Hegemony will have no warning time to reinforce the system.”
Its conference room was hot and dry; like being in a sunbaked desert, except that we were seated around an uneven conference table. Half of the table was set at a height to make humans comfortable, the other half several centimeters higher for the comfort of the big senior officers among the reptilians. The admiral, of course, was the biggest of them all: nearly three meters tall when standing, the dun-colored scales of its chest almost completely covered with symbols of rank and distinction.
The walls of the conference room were filled with holograms of arid rocky country and a blazing bronze sky. I was tempted to shield my eyes from the sun, but the brightness actually was never high enough to cause real glare.
“The nearest Hegemony base to Bititu is in the Justice system,” I pointed out. “That’s only a dozen light- years away. The enemy could send a battle fleet to Bititu before we’ve secured the asteroid.”
The admiral flicked its forked tongue in and out almost faster than the eyes could follow, its way of working off nervous energy.
“We will remain in the Jilbert system until you have secured the asteroid, never fear,” said the admiral. “My fleet is powerful enough to take care of any Hegemony attempt to reinforce Bititu.”
I remembered the way the Tsihn fleet had bolted from Lunga and stranded us.
“In point of fact,” said the admiral, tongue flicking blurrily, “we are hoping that the Hegemony will attempt to interfere. It will give us an opportunity to destroy one of their fleets.”
I was glad to hear that it was so confident. Glancing along our end of the conference table to Frede and my other officers, I saw that none of us humans shared its opinion.
My battalion spent most of the flight in training. We converted the troopship’s passageways and compartments into mock-ups of the tunnels and caves we expected to find on Bititu and practiced storming through heavily defended positions, day after day. There was no room for subtlety in our tactics. It was just brute force and firepower. I knew the casualties would be high.
“Why doesn’t the fleet just blow the goddamned asteroid out of existence?” Frede asked one night in our bunk. “Why do we have to take it?”
I had no answer, except, “Maybe the Commonwealth wants to use it as a base for themselves after we’ve driven out the Hegemony.”
“You know what I think,” she asked, then went on without waiting for my reply, “I think it’s those double- domed scientists. They want Arachnoid specimens to study, so we get stuck with the job of trying to capture some of them.”
“But according to our briefings, the Arachnoids fight to the last one,” I said.
“Tell it to the scientists.”
“Still,” I said, thinking aloud, “the fleet could bombard the asteroid before we go in, pound it as hard as they can. It wouldn’t hurt the Arachnoids deep inside the rock, but it could knock out any of them up by the surface.”
“And make our landing easier,” Frede said.
But when I took up the question with the admiral’s chief aide, a reptilian about my own size with beautiful multicolored scales, the answer was: No preliminary bombardment. It would merely alert the Arachnoid defenders and delay our landing.
“But once we show ourselves in the Jilbert system, several light-hours away from the asteroid, won’t that alert them?” I asked.
“No preliminary bombardment,” the reptilian repeated. “The plan is set and will not be changed.”
I demanded the right to ask the admiral about it. Permission denied. I got the impression that the strategists who had planned this operation wanted to capture Bititu as intact as possible. They were perfectly willing to spend our lives in exchange for killing off the defenders without wrecking the asteroid itself.
I had other ideas.
I assigned Frede and my other officers to studying the pictures of Bititu as minutely as possible. I myself spent most of my nights going over those images, pinpointing each spot on that pitted bare rock that looked like an air-lock hatch or a gun emplacement. Then, one by one, I assigned each of those targets to one of our heavy- weapons platoons.
My plan was to knock out those surface defenses as we rode toward the asteroid in our landing vehicles. Instead of sitting inside and waiting passively until we touched down on the surface, I ordered my weapons platoons to zero in on specific targets and destroy them while we were in transit from the troopship to the asteroid.
Otherwise, I feared, the Arachnoid defenders would blast our ships out of the sky before we reached the rock.
As we neared the Jilbert system I worked the troopers harder and harder. Little sleep and less rest. We raced through the ship’s passageways every day and almost every night. When we were not physically assaulting our mock targets we were studying the imagery of Bititu, familiarizing ourselves with every crevice and hollow of its surface, picking out the precise spots where each landing vehicle would touch down on its surface.
Some of the troopers began to complain that by the time we reached our target they would be too tired to fight. I drove them harder.
“We go relativistic in six hours,” the Tsihn liaison officer told me at last. “Then two or three hours to the point where you embark for the asteroid.”
I got my troops ready. We marched to the loading docks where our landing vehicles waited, singing ancient songs of battle and blood. We got into our armored space suits, using the buddy system to check each other carefully. The suits had been anodized white at my insistence; in the dimly lit tunnels of Bititu we had to be able to see each other. No one knew what the visual range of the Arachnoids was, whether white stood out as clearly to them as it did to us, but I was determined to avoid killing ourselves with friendly fire.
I put the heavy-weapons platoons in the first of our forty landers, with the other platoons’ landers coming in behind them. I put myself in the first of the weapons platoons.
As the troops clambered aboard the landers, awkward in their heavily armored suits, Frede came up beside me, her helmet visor raised, an odd, expectant smile on her face.
“Well, we’re as ready as we can be,” she said, her voice trembling ever so slightly.
“Make certain your weapons team hits every assigned target,” I said. “Especially the air locks. Maybe those spiders can breathe vacuum, but I doubt it.”
“I never liked spiders,” she said.
“Now’s your chance to kill a few thousand of them.”
She nodded inside the space helmet, then slid the visor down and lumbered off to her landing vehicle. I clamped my visor and sealed it. I had done everything I could think of. Now it was us against them, with no mercy expected either way.
The landing vehicles were little more than armored shields with handgrips for the troops and propulsion units hung off their sterns. We pushed off the troopship, forty landers, and slid out into the darkness of space.
“Here we go,” said one of the troopers. I heard his tense, shaky voice through my helmet earphones.
“Another free ride, courtesy of the army.”
“Enjoy your trip.”
“Yeah. You gotta be born to it.”
No one laughed.
The sullen red star off in the distance gave very little light. The dark, pitted rock of Bititu seemed to float out there among the stars, a long way off. And we seemed to be hanging in the middle of the emptiness, barely moving. As I clung to the handgrips behind the forward armored shield, in the midst of the heavy-weapons platoon, I had to turn my entire body around to see the troopship we had just left. Farther in the distance hovered
