The Road Not Taken Read online

As his SR-81 gulped kerosene from the tanker, he could not help wondering what would have happened if he’d turned a missile loose. There were a couple of times he’d had a perfect shot. That was one thought he kept firmly to himself. What his superiors would do if they knew about it was too gruesome to contemplate.

  The troopers crowded round Togram as he came back from the officers’ conclave. “What’s the word, captain’?” “Did the loaf live?” “What’s it like down there?”

  “The loaf lived, boys!” Togram said with a broad smile.

  His company raised a cheer that echoed deafeningly in the barracks room. “We’re going down!” they whooped. Ears stood high in excitement. Some soldiers waved plumed hats in the fetid air. Others, of a bent more like their captain’s, went over to their pallets and began seeing to their weapons.

  “How tough are they going to be, sir?” a gray-furred veteran named Ilingua asked as Togram went by. “I hear the flier pilot saw some funny things.”

  Togram’s smile got wider. “By the heavens and hells, Ilingua, haven’t you done this often enough to know better than pay heed to rumors you hear before planetfall?”

  “I hope so, sir,” Ilingua said, “but these are so strange I thought there might be something to them.” When Togram did not answer, the trooper shook his head at his own foolishness and shook up a lantern so he could examine his dagger’s edge.

  As inconspicuously as he could, the captain let out a sigh. He did not know what to believe himself, and he had listened to the pilot’s report. How could the locals have flying machines when they did not know contragravity? Togram had heard of a race that used hot-air balloons before it discovered the better way of doing things, but no balloon could have reached the altitude the locals’ flier had achieved, and no balloon could have changed direction, as the pilot had violently insisted this craft had done.

  Assume he was wrong, as he had to be. But how was one to take his account of towns as big as the ones whose possibility Rarisisc had ridiculed, of a world so populous there was precious little open space? And lantern signals from other ships showed their scout pilots were reporting the same wild improbabilities.

  Well, in the long run it would not matter if this race was numerous as reffo at a picnic. There would simply be that many more subjects here for Roxolan.

  “This is a terrible waste,” Billy Cox said to anyone who would listen as he slung his duffelbag over his shoulder and tramped out to the waiting truck. “We should be meeting the starpeople with open arms, not with a show of force.”

  “You tell ’em, Professor,” Sergeant Santos Amoros chuckled from behind him. “Me, I’d sooner stay on my butt in a nice, air-conditioned barracks than face L.A. summer smog and sun any old day. Damn shame you’re just a Spec-1. If you was President, you could give the orders any way you wanted, instead o’ takin’ ’em.”

  Cox didn’t think that was very fair either. He’d been just a few units short of his M.A. in poli sci when the big buildup after the second Syrian crisis sucked him into the army.

  He had to fold his lanky length like a jackknife to get under the olive-drab canopy of the truck and down into passenger compartment. The scats were too hard and too close together. Jamming people into the vehicle counted for more than their comfort while they were there. Typical military thinking, Cox thought disparagingly.

  The truck filled. The big diesel rumbled to life. A black soldier dug out a deck of cards and bet anyone that he could turn twenty-five cards into five pat poker hands. A couple of greenhorns took him up on it. Cox had found out the expensive way that it was a sucker bet. The black man was grinning as he offered the deck to one of his marks to shuffle.

  Riffff! The ripple of the pasteboards was authoritative enough to make everybody in the truck turn his head. “Where’d you learn to handle cards like that, man?” demanded the black soldier, whose name was Jim but whom everyone called Junior.

  “Dealing blackjack in Vegas.” Riffff!

  “Hey, Junior,” Cox called, “all of a sudden I want ten bucks of your action.”

  “Up yours too, pal,” Junior said, glumly watching the cards move as if they had lives of their own.

  The truck rolled northward, part of a convoy of trucks, MICV’s, and light tanks that stretched for miles. An entire regiment was heading into Los Angeles, to be billeted by companies in different parts of the sprawling city. Cox approved of that; it made it less likely that he would personally come face-to-face with any of the aliens.

  “Sandy,” he said to Amoros, who was squeezed in next to him, “even if I’m wrong and the aliens aren’t friendly, what the hell good will hand weapons do? It’d be like taking on an elephant with a safety pin.”

  “Professor, like I told you already, they don’t pay me to think, or you neither. Just as well, too. I’m gonna do what the lieutenant tells me, and you’re gonna do what I tell you, and everything is gonna be fine, right?”

  “Sure,” Cox said, because Sandy, while he wasn’t a bad guy, was a sergeant. All the same, the Neo-Armalite between Cox’s boots seemed very futile, and his helmet and body armor as thin and gauzy as a stripper’s negligee.

  The sky outside the steerers’ dome began to go from black to deep blue as the Indomitable entered atmosphere. “There,” Olgren said, pointing. “That’s where we’ll land.”

  “Can’t see much from this height,’’ Togram remarked.

  “Let him use your spyglass, Olgren,” Ransisc said. “He’ll be going back to his company soon.”

  Togram grunted; that was more than a comment—it was also a hint. Even so, he was happy to peer through the eyepiece. The ground seemed to leap toward him. There was a moment of disorientation as he adjusted to the inverted image, which put the ocean on the wrong side of the field of view. But he was not interested in sightseeing. He wanted to learn what his soldiers and the rest of the troops aboard the Indomitable would have to do to carve out a beachhead and hold it against the locals.

  “There’s a spot that looks promising,” he said. “The greenery there in the midst of the buildings in the eastern—no, the western—part of the city. That should give us a clear landing zone, a good campground, and a base for landing reinforcements.”

  “Let’s see what you’re talking about,” Ransisc said, elbowing him aside. “Hmm, yes, I see the stretch you mean. That might not be bad. Olgren, come look at this. Can you find it again in the Warmaster’s spyglass? All right then, go point it out to him. Suggest it as our setdown point.”

  The apprentice hurried away. Ransisc bent over the eyepiece again. “Hmm,” he repeated. “They build tall down there, don’t they?”

  “I thought so,” Togram said. “And there’s a lot of traffic on those roads. They’ve spent a fortune cobblestoning them all, too; I didn’t see any dust kicked up.”

  “This should be a rich conquest,” Ransisc said.

  Something swift, metallic, and predator-lean flashed past the observation window. “By the gods, they do have fliers, don’t they?” Togram said. In spite of the pilots’ claims, deep down he hadn’t believed it until he saw it for himself.

  He noticed Ransisc’s ears twitching impatiently, and realized he really had spent too much time in the observation room. He picked up his glowmite lantern and went back to his troopers.

  A couple of them gave him a resentful look for being away so long, but he cheered them up by passing on as much as he could about their landing site. Common soldiers loved nothing better than inside information. They second-guessed their superiors without it, but the game was even more fun when they had some idea of what they were talking about.

  A runner appeared in the doorway. “Captain Togram, your company will planet from airlock three.”

  “Three,” Togram acknowledged, and the runner trotted off to pass orders to other ground troop leaders. The captain put his plumed hat on his head (the plume was scarlet, so his company could recognize him in combat), checked his pistols one last time, and ordered his troopers to follo
w him.

  The reeking darkness was as oppressive in front of the inner airlock door as anywhere else aboard the Indomitable, but somehow easier to bear. Soon the doors would swing open and he would feel fresh breezes riffling his fur, taste sweet clean air, enjoy sunlight for more than a few precious units at a stretch. Soon he would measure himself against these new beings in combat.

  He felt the slightest of jolts as the Indomtable’s fliers launched themselves from the mother ship. There would he no luofi aboard them this time, but musketeers to terrorize the natives with fire from above, and jars of gunpowder to be touched off and dropped. The Roxolani always strove to make as savage a first impression as they could. Terror doubled their effective numbers.

  Another jolt came, different from the one before. They were down.

  A shadow spread across the UCLA campus. Craning his neck, Junior said. “Will you look at the size of the mother!” He had been saying that to the last five minutes, as the starship slowly descended.

  Each time, Billy Cox could only nod. his mouth dry, his hands clutching the plastic grip and cool metal barrel of his rifle. The Neo-Armalite seemed totally impotent against the huge bulk floating so arrogantly downward. The alien flying machines around it were as minnows beside a whale, while they in turn dwarfed the USAF planes circling at a greater distance. The roar of their jets assailed the ears of the nervous troops and civilians on the ground. The aliens’ engines were eerily silent.

  The starship landed in the open quad between New Royce, New Haines, New Kinsey, and New Powell Halls. It towered higher than any of the two-story red brick buildings, each a reconstruction of one overthrown in the earthquake of 2034. Cox heard saplings splinter under the weight of the alien craft. He wondered what it would have done to the big trees that had fallen five years ago along with the famous old halls.

  “All right, they’ve landed. Let’s move on up,” Lieutenant Shotton ordered. He could not quite keep the wobble out of his voice, but he trotted south toward the starship. His platoon followed him past Dickson Art Center, past New Bunche Hall. Not so long ago, Billy Cox had walked this campus barefoot. Now his boots thudded on concrete.

  The platoon deployed in front of Dodd Hall, looking west toward the spacecraft. A little breeze toyed with the leaves of the young, hopeful trees planted to replace the stalwarts lost to the quake.

  “Take as much cover as you can,” Lieutenant Shotton ordered quietly. The platoon scrambled into flowerbeds, snuggled down behind thin treetrunks. Out on Hilgard Avenue, diesels roared as armored fighting vehicles took positions with good lines of fire.

  It was all such a waste, Cox thought bitterly. The thing to do was to make friends with the aliens, not to assume automatically they were dangerous.

  Something, at least, was being done along those lines. A delegation came out of Murphy Hall and slowly walked behind a white flag from the administration building toward the starship. At the head of the delegation was the mayor of Los Angeles: the President and governor were busy elsewhere. Billy Cox would have given anything to be part of the delegation instead of sprawled here on his belly in the grass. If only the aliens had waited until he was fifty or so, had given him a chance to get established—

  Sergeant Amoros nudged him with an elbow. “Look there, man. Something’s happening—”

  Amoros was right. Several hatchways which had been shut were swinging open, allowing Earth’s air to mingle with the ship’s.

  The westerly breeze picked up. Cox’s nose twitched. He could not name all the exotic odors wafting his way, but he recognized sewage and garbage when he smelled them. “God, what a stink!” he said.

  “By the gods, what a stink!” Togram exclaimed. When the outer airlock doors went down, he had expected real fresh air to replace the stale, overused gases inside the Indomitable. This stuff smelled like smoky peat fires, or lamps whose wicks hadn’t quite been extinguished. And it stung! He felt the nictitating membranes flick across his eyes to protect them.

  “Deploy!” he ordered, leading his company forward. This was the tricky part. If the locals had nerve enough, they could hit the Roxolani just as the latter were corning out of their ship, and cause all sorts of trouble. Most races without hyperdrive, though, were too overawed by the arrival of travelers from the stars to try anything like that. And if they didn’t do it fast, it would be too late.

  They weren’t doing it here. Togram saw a few locals, but they were keeping a respectful distance. He wasn’t sure how many there were. Their mottled skins—or was that clothing’?—made them hard to notice and count. But they were plainly warriors, both by the way they acted and by the weapons they bore.

  His own company went into its familiar two-line formation, the first crouching, the second standing and aiming their muskets over the heads of the troops in front.

  “Ah, there we go,” Togram said happily. The bunch approaching behind the white banner had to be the local nobles. The mottling, the captain saw, was clothing, for these beings wore entirely different garments, somber except for strange, narrow neckcloths. They were taller and skinnier than Roxolani, with muzzleless faces.

  “Ilingua!” Togram called. The veteran trooper led the right flank squad of the company.

  “Sir!”

  “Your troops, quarter-right face. At the command, pick off the leaders there. That will demoralize the rest,” Togram said, quoting standard doctrine.

  “Slowmatches ready!” Togram said. The Roxolani lowered the smoldering cords to the toucholes of their muskets. “Take your aim!” The guns moved, very slightly. “Fire!”

  “Teddy bears!” Sandy Amoros exclaimed. The same thought had leaped into Cox’s mind. The beings emerging from the spaceship were round, brown, and furry, with long noses and big ears. Teddy bears, however, did not normally carry weapons. They also, Cox thought, did not commonly live in a place that smelled like sewage. Of course it might have been perfume to them. But if it was, they and Earthpeople were going to have trouble getting along.

  He watched the Teddy bears as they took their positions. Somehow their positioning did not suggest that they were forming an honor guard for the mayor and his party. Yet it did look familiar to Cox, although he could not quite figure out why.

  Then he had it. If he had been anywhere but at UCLA, he would not have made the connection. But he remembered a course he had taken on the rise of the European nation-states in the sixteenth century. and on the importance of the professional, disciplined armies the kings had created. Those early armies had performed evolutions like this one.

  It was a funny coincidence. He was about to mention it to his sergeant when the world blew up.

  Flames spurted from the aliens’ guns. Great gouts of smoke puffed into the sky. Something that sounded like an angry wasp buzzed past Cox’s ear. He heard shouts and shrieks from either side. Most of the mayor’s delegation was down, some motionless, others thrashing.

  There was a crash from the starship, and another one an instant later as a roundshout smashed into the brickwork of Dodd Hall. A chip stung Cox in the back of the neck. The breeze brought him the smell of fireworks, one he had not smelled for years.

  “Reload!” Togram yelled. “Another volley, then at ’em with the bayonet!” His troopers worked frantically, measuring powder charges and ramming round bullets home.

  “So that’s how they wanna play!” Amoros shouted. “Nail their hides to the wall!” The tip of his little finger had been shot away. He did not seem to know it.

  Cox’s Neo-Armalite was already barking, spitting a stream of hot brass cartridges, slamming against his shoulder. He rammed in clip after clip, playing the rifle like a hose. if one bullet didn’t bite, the next would.

  Others from the platoon were also firing. Cox heard bursts of automatic weapons fire from different parts of the campus, too, and the deeper blasts of rocket-propelled grenades and field artillery. Smoke not of the aliens’ making began to envelop their ship and the soldiers around it.

  One
or two shots came back at the platoon, and then a few more, but so few that Cox, in stunned disbelief, shouted to his sergeant, “This isn’t fair!”

  “Fuck ’em!” Amoros shouted back. “They wanna throw their weight around, they take their chances. Only good thing they did was knock over the mayor. Always did hate that old crackpot”

  The harsh tac-tac-tac did not sound like any gunfire Togram had heard. The shots came too close together, making a horrible sheet of noise. And if the locals were shooting back at his troopers, where were the thick, choking clouds of gunpowder smoke over their position?

  He did not know the answer to that. What he did know was that his company was going down like grain before a scythe. Here a soldier was hit by three bullets at once and fell awkwardly, as if his body could not tell in which direction to twist. There another had the top of his head gruesomely removed.

  The volley the captain had screamed for was stillborn. Perhaps a squad’s worth of soldiers moved toward the locals, the sun glinting bravely off their long, polished bayonets. None of them got more than a half-sixteen of paces before falling.

  Ilingua looked at Togram, horror in his eyes, his ears flat against his head. The captain knew his were the same. “What arc they doing to us?” Ilingua howled.

  Togram could only shake his head helplessly. He dove behind a corpse, fired one of his pistols at the enemy. There was still a chance, he thought—how would these demonic aliens stand up under their first air attack?

  A flier swooped toward the locals. Musketeers blasted away from firing ports, drew back to reload.

  “Take that, you whoresons!” Togram shouted. He did not, however, raise his fist in the air. That, he had already learned, was dangerous.

  “Incoming aircraft!” Sergeant Amoros roared. His squad, those not already prone, flung themselves on their faces. Cox heard shouts of pain through the combat din as men were wounded.

  The Cottonmouth crew launched their shoulder-fired AA missile at the alien flying machine. The pilot must have had reflexes like a cat’s. He sidestepped his machine in midair; no plane built on Earth could have matched that performance. The Cottonmouth shot harmlessly past.