'Yeah. I see.'

'Is something ... what's the matter, William?'

Either I'd been improbably lucky or Diana was a very good actress. 'Nothing. Yeah, I better get something for this hand.' I opened the door. 'Saved me a lot of trouble.'

She looked straight into my eyes. 'That's true.'

Actually, I'd traded one kind of trouble for another. Despite the fact that there were several disinterested witnesses to Graubard's demise, there was a persistent rumor that I'd had Doc Alsever simply exterminate him since I'd botched the job myself and didn't want to go through a troublesome court-martial.

The fact was that, under the Universal Code of Military 'Justice,' Graubard hadn't deserved any kind of trial at all. All I had to do was say 'You, you and you. Take this man out and kill him, please.' And woe betide the private who refused to carry out the order.

My relationship with the troops did improve, in a sense. At least outwardly, they showed more deference to me. But I suspected it was at least partly the cheap kind of respect you might offer any ruffian who had proved himself to be dangerous and volatile.

So Killer was my new name. Just when I'd gotten used to Old Queer.

The base quickly settled back into its routine of training and waiting. I was almost impatient for the Taurans to show up, just to get it over with one way or the other.

The troops had adjusted to the situation much better than I had, for obvious reasons. They had specific duties to perform and ample free time for the usual soldierly anodynes to boredom. My duties were more varied but offered little satisfaction, since the problems that percolated up to me were of the 'the buck stops here' type; those with pleasing, unambiguous solutions were taken care of in the lower echelons.

I'd never cared much for sports or games, but found myself turning to them more and more as a kind of safety valve. For the first time in my life, in these tense, claustrophobic surroundings, I couldn't escape into reading or study. So I fenced, quarterstaff and saber, with the other officers, worked myself to exhaustion on the exercise machines and even kept a jump-rope in my office. Most of the other officers played chess, but they could usually beat me whenever I won it gave me the feeling I was being humored. Word games were difficult because my language was an archaic dialect that they had trouble manipulating. And I lacked the time and talent to master 'modern' English.

For a while I let Diana feed me mood-altering drugs, but the cumulative effect of them was frightening I was getting addicted in a way that was at first too subtle to bother me so I stopped short. Then I tried some systematic psychoanalysis with Lieutenant Wilber. It was impossible. Although he knew all about my problem in an academic kind of way, we didn't speak the same cultural language; his counseling me about love and sex was like me telling a fourteenth-century serf how best to get along with his priest and landlord.

And that, after all, was the root of my problem. I was sure I could have handled the pressures and frustrations of command; of being cooped up in a cave with these people who at times seemed scarcely less alien than the enemy; even the near-certainty that it could lead only to painful death in a worthless cause if only I could have had Marygay with me. And the feeling got more intense as the months crept by.

He got very stern with me at this point and accused me of romanticizing my position. He knew what love was, he said; he had been in love himself. And the sexual polarity of the couple made no difference all right, I could accept that; that idea had been a cliche in my parents' generation (though it had run into some predictable resistance in my own). But love, he said, love was a fragile blossom; love was a delicate crystal; love was an unstable reaction with a half-life of about eight months. Bullshit, I said, and accused him of wearing cultural blinders; thirty centuries of prewar society taught that love was one thing that could last to the grave and even beyond and if he had been born instead of hatched he would know that without being told! Whereupon he would assume a wry, tolerant expression and reiterate that I was merely a victim of self-imposed sexual frustration and romantic delusion.

In retrospect, I guess we had a good time arguing with each other. Cure me, he didn't.

I did have a new friend who sat in my lap all the time. It was the cat, who had the usual talent for hiding from people who like cats and cleaving unto those who have sinus trouble or just don't like sneaky little animals. We did have something in common, though, since to my knowledge he was the only other heterosexual male mammal within any reasonable distance. He'd been castrated, of course, but that didn't make much difference under the circumstances.

6.

It was exactly 400 days since the day we had begun construction. I was sitting at my desk not checking out Hilleboe's new duty roster. The cat was on my lap, purring loudly even though I refused to pet it. Charlie was stretched out in a chair reading something on the viewer. The phone buzzed and it was the Commodore.

'They're here.'

'What?'

'I said they're here. A Tauran ship just exited the collapsar field. Velocity .80c. Deceleration thirty gees. Give or take.'

Charlie was leaning over my desk. 'What?' I dumped the cat.

'How long? Before you can pursue?' I asked.

'Soon as you get off the phone.' I switched off and went over to the logistic computer, which was a twin to the one on Masaryk II and had a direct data link to it. While I tried to get numbers out of the thing, Charlie fiddled with the visual display.

The display was a hologram about a meter square by half a meter thick and was programmed to show the positions of Sade-138, our planet, and a few other chunks of rock in the system. There were green and red dots to show the positions of our vessels and the Taurans'.

The computer said that the minimum time it could take the Taurans to decelerate and get back to this planet would be a little over eleven days. Of course, that would be straight maximum acceleration and deceleration all the way; we could pick them off like flies on a wall. So, like us, they'd mix up their direction of flight and degree of acceleration in a random way. Based on several hundred past records of enemy behavior, the computer was able to give us a probability table: Days to

Contact Probability

11 .000001.

15 .001514.

20 .032164.

25 .103287.

30 .676324.

35 .820584.

40 .982685.

45 .993576.

50 .999369.

MEDIAN.

28.9554 .500000.

Unless, of course, Antopol and her gang of merry pirates managed to make a kill. The chances of that, I had learned in the can, were slightly less than fifty-fifty.

But whether it took 28.9554 days or two weeks, those of us on the ground had to just sit on our hands and watch. If Antopol was successful, then we wouldn't have to fight until the regular garrison troops replaced us here and we moved on to the next collapsar.

'Haven't left yet.' Charlie had the display cranked down to minimum scale; the planet was a white ball the size of a large melon and Masaryk II was a green dot off to the right some eight melons away; you couldn't get both on the screen at the same time.

While we were watching, a small green dot popped out of the ship's dot and drifted away from it. A ghostly number 2 drifted beside it, and a key projected on the display's lower left-hand corner identified it as 2 Pursuit Drone. Other numbers in the key identified the Masaryk II, a planetary defense fighter and fourteen planetary defense drones. Those sixteen ships were not yet far enough away from one another to have separate dots.

The cat was rubbing against my ankle; I picked it up and stroked it. 'Tell Hilleboe to call a general assembly. Might as well break it to everyone at once.'

The men and women didn't take it very well, and I couldn't blame them. We had all expected the Taurans to attack much sooner and when they persisted in not coming, the feeling grew that Strike Force Command had made a mistake and that they'd never show up at all.

I wanted the company to start weapons training in earnest; they hadn't used any high-powered weapons in almost two years. So I activated their laser-fingers and passed out the grenade and rocket launchers. We couldn't practice inside the base for fear of damaging the external sensors and defensive laser ring. So we turned off half the circle of gigawatt lasers and went out about a klick beyond the perimeter, one platoon at a time, accompanied by either me or Charlie. Rusk kept a close watch on the early-warning screens. If anything approached, she would send up a flare, and the platoon would have to get back inside the ring before the unknown came over the horizon, at which time the defensive lasers would come on automatically. Besides knocking out the unknown, they would fry the platoon in less than .02 second.

We couldn't spare anything from the base to use as a target, but that turned out to be no problem. The first tachyon rocket we fired scooped out a hole twenty meters long by ten wide by five deep; the rubble gave us a multitude of targets from twice-man-sized on down.

The soldiers were good, a lot better than they had been with the primitive weapons in the stasis field. The best laser practice turned out to be rather like skeetshooting: pair up the people and have one stand behind the other, throwing rocks at random intervals. The one who was shooting had to gauge the rock's trajectory and zap it before it hit the ground. Their eye-hand coordination was impressive (maybe the Eugenics Council had done something right). Shooting at rocks down to pebble-size, most of them could do better than nine out of ten. Old non-bioengineered me could hit maybe seven out of ten, and I'd had a good deal more practice than they had.

They were equally facile at estimating trajectories with the grenade launcher, which was a more versatile weapon than it had been in the past. Instead of shooting one-microton bombs with a standard propulsive charge, it had four different charges and a choice of one-, two-, three- or four-microton bombs. And for really close in-fighting, where it was dangerous to use the lasers, the barrel of the launcher would unsnap, and you could load it with a magazine of 'shotgun' rounds. Each shot would send out an expanding cloud of a thousand tiny flechettes that were instant death out to five meters and turned to harmless vapor at six.

The tachyon rocket launcher required no skill whatsoever. All you had to do was to be careful no one was standing behind you when you fired it; the backwash from the rocket was dangerous for several meters behind the launching tube. Otherwise, you just lined your target up in the crosshairs and pushed the button. You didn't have to worry about trajectory; the rocket traveled in a straight line for all practical purposes. It reached escape velocity in less than a second.

It improved the troops' morale to get out and chew up the landscape with their new toys. But the landscape wasn't fighting back. No matter how physically impressive the weapons were, their effectiveness would depend on what the Taurans could throw back. A Greek phalanx must have looked pretty impressive, but it wouldn't do too well against a single man with a flamethrower.

And as with any engagement, because of time dilation, there was no way to tell what sort of weaponry they would have. They might have never heard of the stasis field. Or they might be able to say a magic word and make us disappear.

I was out with the fourth platoon, burning rocks, when Charlie called and asked me to come back in, urgent. I left Heimoff in charge.

'Another one?' The scale of the holograph display was such that our planet was pea-sized, about five centimeters from the X that marked the position of Sade-138. There were forty-one red and green dots scattered around the field; the key identified number 41 as Tauran Cruiser (2).

'You called Antopol?'

'Yeah.' He anticipated the next question. 'It'll take almost a day for the signal to get there and back.'

'It's never happened before,' but of course Charlie knew that. 'Maybe this collapsar is especially important to them.'

'Likely.' So it was almost certain we'd be fighting on the ground. Even if Antopol managed to get the first cruiser, she wouldn't have a fifty-fifty chance on the second one. Low on drones and fighters. 'I wouldn't like to be Antopol now.'

'She'll just get it earlier.'

'I don't know. We're in pretty good shape.'

'Save it for the troops, William.' He turned down the display's scale to where it showed only two objects: Sade-138 and the new red dot, slowing moving.

We spent the next two weeks watching dots blink out. And if you knew when and where to look, you could go outside and see the real thing happening, a hard bright speck of white light that faded in about a second.

In that second, a nova bomb had put out over a million times the power of a gigawatt laser. It made a miniature star half a klick in diameter and as hot as the interior of the sun. Anything it touched it would consume. The radiation from a near miss could botch up a ship's electronics beyond repair two fighters, one of ours and one of theirs, had evidently suffered that fate, silently drifting out of the system at a constant velocity, without power.

We had used more powerful nova bombs earlier in the war, but the degenerate matter used to fuel them was unstable in large quantities. The bombs had a tendency to explode while they were still inside the ship. Evidently the Taurans had the same problem or they had copied the process from us in the first place because they had also scaled down to nova bombs that used less than a hundred kilograms of degenerate matter. And they deployed them much the same way we did, the warhead separating into dozens of pieces as it approached the target, only one of which was the nova bomb.

They would probably have a few bombs left over after they finished off Masaryk II and her retinue of fighters and drones. So it was likely that we were wasting time and energy in weapons practice.

The thought did slip by my conscience that I could gather up eleven people and board the fighter we had hidden safe behind the stasis field. It was pre-programmed to take us back to Stargate.

I even went to the extreme of making a mental list of the eleven, trying to think of eleven people who meant more to me than the rest. Turned out I'd be picking six at random.

I put the thought away, though. We did have a chance, maybe a damned good one, even against a fully-armed cruiser. It wouldn't be easy to get a nova bomb close enough to include us inside its kill-radius.

Besides, they'd space me for desertion. So why bother?

Spirits rose when one of Antopol's drones knocked out the first Tauran cruiser. Not counting the ships left behind for planetary defense, she still had eighteen drones and two fighters. They wheeled around to intercept the second cruiser, by then a few light hours away, still being harassed by fifteen enemy drones.

One of the Tauran drones got her. Her ancillary crafts continued the attack, but it was a rout. One fighter and three drones fled the battle at maximum acceleration, looping up over the plane of the ecliptic, and were not pursued. We watched them with morbid interest while the enemy cruiser inched back to do battle with us. The fighter was headed back for Sade-138, to escape. Nobody blamed them. In fact, we sent them a farewell/good luck message; they didn't respond, naturally, being zipped up in the tanks. But it would be recorded.

It took the enemy five days to get back to the planet and be comfortably ensconced in a stationary orbit on the other side. We settled in for the inevitable first phase of the attack, which would be aerial and totally automated: their drones against our lasers. I put a force of fifty men and women inside the stasis field, in case one of the drones got through. An empty gesture, really; the enemy could just stand by and wait for them to turn off the field, fry them the second it flickered out.

Charlie had a weird idea that I almost went for.

'We could boobytrap the place.'

'What do you mean?' I said. 'This place is boobytrapped, out to twenty-five klicks.'

'No, not the mines and such. I mean the base itself, here, underground.'

'Go on.'

'There are two nova bombs in that fighter.' He pointed at the stasis field through a couple of hundred meters of rock. 'We can roll them down here, boobytrap, them, then hide everybody in the stasis field and wait.'

In a way it was tempting. It would relieve me from any responsibility for decision-making, leave everything up to chance. 'I don't think it would work, Charlie.'

He seemed hurt. 'Sure it would.'

'No, look. For it to work, you have to get every single Tauran inside the kill-radius before it goes off but they wouldn't all come charging in here once they breached our defenses. Least of all if the place seemed deserted. They'd suspect something, send in an advance party. And after the advance party set off the bombs'

'We'd be back where we started, yeah. Minus the base. Sorry.'

I shrugged. 'It was an idea. Keep thinking, Charlie.' I turned my attention back to the display, where the lopsided space war was in progress. Logically enough, the enemy wanted to knock out that one fighter overhead before he started to work on us. About all we could do was watch the red dots crawl around the planet and try to score. So far the pilot had managed to knock out all the drones; the enemy hadn't sent any fighters after him yet.

I'd given the pilot control over five of the lasers in our defensive ring. They couldn't do much good, though. A gigawatt laser pumps out a billion kilowatts per second at a range of a hundred meters. A thousand klicks up, though, the beam was attenuated to ten kilowatts. Might do some damage if it hit an optical sensor. At least confuse things.

'We could use another fighter. Or six.'

'Use up the drones,' I said. We did have a fighter, of course, and a swabbie attached to us who could pilot it. It might turn out to be our only hope, if they got us cornered in the stasis field.

'How far away is the other guy?' Charlie asked, meaning the fighter pilot who had turned tail. I cranked down the scale, and the green dot appeared at the right of the display. 'About six light hours.' He had two drones left, too near to him to show as separate dots, having expended one in covering his getaway. 'He's not accelerating any more, but he's doing point nine gee.'

'Couldn't do us any good if he wanted to.' Need almost a month to slow down.

At that low point, the light that stood for our own defensive fighter faded out. 'Shit.'

'Now the fun starts. Should I tell the troops to get ready, stand by to go topside?'

'No ... have them suit up, in case we lose air. But I expect it'll be a little while before we have a ground attack.' I turned the scale up again. Four red dots were already creeping around the globe toward us.

I got suited up and came back to Administration to watch the fireworks on the monitors.

The lasers worked perfectly. All four drones converged on us simultaneously; were targeted and destroyed. All but one of the nova bombs went off below our horizon (the visual horizon was about ten kilometers away, but the lasers were mounted high and could target something at twice that distance). The bomb that detonated on our horizon had melted out a semicircular chunk that glowed brilliantly white for several minutes. An hour later, it was still glowing dull orange, and the ground temperature outside had risen to fifty degrees Absolute, melting most of our snow, exposing an irregular dark gray surface.