Jem

  "What? Well, yes. But we must be as brothers, to take revenge! We must be allies against the Greasies and the Fats."

  Sharn-igon reared up, trapping him against the wall of a ruined shed. "I now need new allies, Ahmed Dulla," he ground out, falling upon him. In the last moment Dulla saw what was to happen and tried to escape. But it was too late; his quickness was not enough when he dodged from the snatching claws only to take the full force of the murderous club of chitin that stove his head in.

  When he was quite sure Dulla was dead, Sharn-igon staggered away, blundering through the dried shells that had once been friends, to rest creakily against the wall of a shop he had once known.

  He took little satisfaction in the death of one more Poison Ghost. He did not even mourn any longer for the death of his city. A nearer pain touched him. His joints were aching, his body felt bloated, his carapace seemed to be sundering at the seams. It was not his time. But there was no doubt about it. Alone in the open tomb that had once been his home, with no one to care for him while he was helpless, he was beginning to molt.

  EIGHTEEN

  AT 0130 HOURS, Major Santangelo, along with the pilot-engineer who had brought in the third ship, reported in.

  "Some good news, Margie. There's a coal outcropping in the Bad Hills, two kilometers up. Plus we can burn wood and biomass, and Richy here says we can make a steam boiler with plates from one of the landing craft. If your turbine arrives, that means we can drive the generator up to full capacity, fifty kilowatts, without using up our fuel reserves."

  "When?"

  Santangelo looked at the engineer. "Ten days? Call it two weeks."

  "Call it one week," Margie snapped. "What about alcohol?"

  "Well, Morrissey's got a kind of a yeast—something like a yeast—anyway, he's getting fermentation. Should be putting the first batch through the solar still tomorrow. You can probably smell it."

  "Saint, I can taste it. I need that alcohol to stretch out the airplane fuel!"

  "I'll goose him along," Santangelo promised.

  "Do it," said Margie. When they were gone she picked up the handset and called the radio shack. "Any ETA yet?"

  "No, ma'am. They're still in orbit, figuring a minimum-energy descent." She hung up. At least the resupply ship was in orbit around Jem, not light-years away. But that last little step was a killer. The captain had radioed that his maneuvering reserve was low and he was waiting for the most favorable approach. That might be days! Worse than that. If the Cape had launched them without plenty of reserve, that meant things were seriously wrong at the Cape. Even wronger than the coded tactrans from Earth had indicated, and that was wrong enough.

  She looked at her watch: 0145. "Send in Dr. Arkashvili," she called, and the medic came in on cue, bearing a cup of steaming black coffee.

  "Medical supplies, Margie. But a little sleep would do you more good."

  Marge sniffed the aluminum cup rapturously and took a scalding sip. "I wish they'd land," she said fretfully. Among the goodies on her shopping list were coffee beans, or seeds, or whatever it took to try to grow coffee for themselves. Otherwise the next couple of years, anyway, might be coffee-free. Of course, the Greasies probably had some growing already, to make that vile stuff they handed out in the little brass pots, but they weren't likely to give any away. They weren't giving anything away now, not even information over the radio; and the Peeps simply were not answering at all.

  At least the camp was gratifyingly healthy, according to the medic's report. The antiallergens were standing up well, and there was nothing else in the Jemman environment to make a human being sick. A few headaches, probably from the climate and from the switch to a twenty-four-hour day; some dentistry; an appendix that needed watching; a request for a vasectomy—

  "No," said Margie sharply. "Don't do any vasectomies. Or laparoscopies, either."

  The doctor looked thoughtful. "You're going to have some knocked-up personnel."

  "You're supposed to be able to handle that, right? Anyway, give them the pill, diaphragms, condoms—anything reversible or temporary. I get along fine with an IUD, and I can always take it out if I want to have a baby."

  "Which you might?"

  "Which all of us females may damn well have to, Cheech. That's an order: everybody capable of breeding stays capable. How's the baby bank?"

  "Coming along fine. I've got twenty-eight ova in cryonic hold, and about a hundred sperm samples."

  "Good, Cheech, but not good enough. I want a hundred percent compliance with that. If anything happens to anybody, I don't want his genes lost. Or hers. They don't take up much space, do they? Then I want, let's say, four samples from each, and—what are you grinning about?"

  The medic said, "Well, it's just that a couple of the ova turned out to be prefertilized. They're fine. They'll keep in the deep-freeze indefinitely, but whenever you want them reimplanted we won't have to go to the bother of getting them started."

  "Hum." Margie scratched thoughtfully. "I'm almost sorry you took the sample; we could start having kids any time now. Who were they? Come on, Cheech, none of this medical confidentiality; I'm your commanding officer."

  "Well, one was Ana Dimitrova."

  "No shit! Whose kid?"

  "You can ask her if you want to. I didn't."

  Marge shook her head wonderingly. "I would have guessed her about last," she said. "And the other one? Now, wait a minute! It couldn't be me! The IUD—"

  "The IUD doesn't keep an ovum from getting fertilized; it only prevents it taking root and developing."

  Margie sat back and stared at the doctor. "I'll be damned," she said.

  Nguyen Dao Tree was ten minutes late for his 0200 appointment, and he arrived sleepy-eyed and irritable. "This twenty-four hour day of yours is not comfortable, Margie," he complained.

  "You're not the one to bitch, Guy. I took the midnight-to-eight myself. If you'd spend your sleeping time sleeping instead of tomcatting around with every woman in the camp—"

  "As to that, Marjorie," he said, "I much preferred when you and I slept on the same schedule."

  "Yeah. Well. Maybe we'll have to do something about that, Guy, but right now we're late for inspection." She swallowed the last of her coffee, now cold but still delicious, and led the way.

  Complaints aside, the three-shift day was working well. On the plus side, the perimeter was well guarded, the hectarage under cultivation was growing by nearly two thousand square meters every day, the each-one-teach-one training schedule Santangelo had set up so that the skills of the community were shared among several persons (what if Chiche Arkashvili died? or their one and only surviving agronomist?) was on track. On the minus, aerial surveillance showed large numbers of Krinpit roaming around the woods, coffee was not the only food item to be running low, and the resupply ship still could not give a firm landing time.

  Margie allowed one hour of each day for her inspection, and she used every minute of it. No white-glove chickenshit. The inspection was rough and dirty; if everybody was doing their job and the jobs were being done, that was it. Her Bastogne grandfather had not cared if the troops were shaved, only if they could fight. And Margie had learned the skills appropriate to a fortress under siege.

  That was what they were. No one had attacked the perimeter, not even a wandering Krinpit. But they were isolated in a world of enemies. From spy satellites and balloonists, from the breaking of codes and from what little could be gleaned from their infrequent radio contacts, above all from the contents of the Indonesian's pouch, Margie had formed a pretty good idea of what the Greasies were up to. Or had been up to a few weeks earlier. They had occupied the Peeps' camp; they had requisitioned quantities and varieties of personnel and equipment that made her drool. Even her letter to Santa Claus (who might or might not be hanging in orbit, waiting to come down her chimney) had not been so greedy. They had subdued the local autochthons, apparently by killing off all the nearby Krinpit and shooting down any balloonist who came near. Their burro
wers they seemed to have tamed. And they were using them for minerals exploration, because it seemed the Greasies had perched themselves on a Kuwait of oil and a Scranton of other fossil fuels. They had devised an enzyme, or possibly it was a hormone—the information had been unclear—which took Krinpit out of action as effectively as 2, 4-D had dried up the jungles of Vietnam, by causing them to molt. They had acquired something from their Creepies that let them make building materials out of dirt, as the burrowers themselves hardened the interior surfaces of their tunnels. They had—Christ, what had they not done! If only her father had listened to her and given her the support she demanded, how gladly and competently she could have done the same!

  Not that she had done badly. But for Marge Menninger there was no such thing as second best, and the Greasies at that moment controlled the entire planet. Barring the dozen hectares her colony sat on, it was all theirs. Their aircraft roamed it at will, so the spy satellites said. They had three separate colonies now, counting the one that had once belonged to the probably no longer surviving Peeps. And apart from the rare occasions when she dared send Kappelyushnikov on a quick survey flight (what would she do if there were some unexplained "accident" to her one and only aircraft?), she was blind except for what the satellites and the few living balloonists could tell. She had even grounded Danny Dalehouse. Not only because of the risk to him—but that was a reason in itself, she admitted privately; she did not want him killed—but because the electricity that made his hydrogen was better used for floodlights to protect the camp and make the crops grow. Also she had apprenticed him to the agronomist, along with Morrissey and the Bulgarian girl—wait a minute, she thought to herself; Dalehouse and Dimitrova? Maybe so. Probably not. They had been friendly, but not that friendly. But then who?

  For that matter, she thought, looking at Guy Tree as he chattered away about contingency plans in the event of a major Krinpit attack, who was the father of her own sort-of child? Dalehouse? Tree? That son of a bitch Sweggert, with his cute little tricks? They were the most likely candidates, but which?

  In other times, one part of Marge Menninger would have contemplated with sardonic amusement that other part of Marge Menninger which really, dammit!, wanted to know. At present she had no room for that sort of amusement in her mind. The thought of mentioning to Nguyen Tree that the two of them might be in the process of becoming somewhat delayed parents crossed her mind just long enough for her to dismiss it. It promised some good comedy, but it also promised complications she did not want to handle. First things first.

  "Are there any archers in the camp?" she asked.

  Tree stopped in the middle of explaining his proposal for arming a couple of canoes. "What?"

  "People who know how to shoot a bow and arrow, dammit. We must have some. I'd like to organize a contest, part of the sports program."

  "Very likely so, Marjorie. I don't believe there are any bows and arrows, however."

  "If they know how to shoot them, they know how to make them, don't they? Or anyway, it'll be in the microfiches. Get started on that, please, Guy. We'll give prizes. Coffee, cigarettes. I'll donate a bottle of Scotch." The thought that had crossed her mind as he spoke of how he planned to mount a light machine gun in a canoe was that the supplies of ammunition for the guns would not last forever, either, but she wasn't ready to say that even to her second in command.

  Tree looked puzzled, but paused to make a note in his book. "It would be a useful skill for hunting, I suppose."

  Margie nodded without replying. Hunting what? Every animal they had seen on the surface of the planet was well enough armored to laugh off any homemade bow—a conspicuous blunder on the part of evolution in this place, she was convinced. But she let it go.

  As they were inspecting the power plant a messenger from the communications shack trotted up. "Ship's on its way in, colonel," she reported, panting. "They've already retrofired. We ought to see them in a couple of minutes."

  "Thank God," said Margie. "Put it on the PA. Guy, get twenty grunts for unloading. Tell Major Arkashvili to stand by in case they land rough."

  They didn't land rough. But they didn't land right, either. The drogue chute deployed handsomely, the craft came swinging down on its cluster of three big chutes they jettisoned on schedule, and it came in on its rockets. But it never made it to the beach where the others had landed. It came in almost a kilometer short and dropped into the jungle and out of sight.

  The good part was that no one was hurt. The fifteen persons on board all came into the camp on their own power; and twelve of them were both young and female. God had answered Margie's prayer that far, at least. The bad part was that everything on the ship had to be manhandled over eight hundred meters of bad terrain, through jungle and over half a dozen ravines. No matter. They were there. And as Margie scanned the bill of lading she began to relax. It was all there, every last thing she had asked for, and more besides. Seeds and hand tools, weapons and training manuals. It was not enough—there was no such thing as enough—but it was all she had hoped.

  First priority was to get everything movable inside the perimeter of the camp. That meant organizing working parties and armed guards to go with them. No Krinpit had been spotted near the landing site, but the woods were full of them. It wasn't until the first detachments began straggling back with cases of food and boxes of microfiches, folded bicycles and crates of electronic parts, that Margie relaxed long enough to greet the new arrivals. She shook each hand, spoke each name, and turned them over to Santangelo for assignment to quarters. A short black major hung behind. "I've got something for you, colonel," he said, patting a dispatch case. "In private, if you please, ma'am."

  "Come ahead. Vandemeer, is it?" He nodded politely and followed her into her office, where he placed his dispatch case on her desk.

  "This is it, ma'am," he said, unsnapping the case.

  It was not a dispatch case. When he had undone the snaps the side peeled back and revealed a microprocessor with a liquid-crystal panel. He touched one of the buttons and it sprang into light, displaying a row of close-typed symbols.

  "There's your guidance, ma'am. There are twelve satellite busters in orbit, and these are the controls."

  Margie touched it. A warm feeling grew in the pit of her stomach and spread, an almost sexual excitement. "You're checked out on this, Vandemeer? Can you locate the Greasies' satellites?"

  "Yes, ma'am. We've got acquisition and lock on four of theirs, including their main tactran receiver. Also the Peeps; they have two, but they don't seem to be active." He expertly punched a combination into the processor, and the colors of the symbols changed. "Green lights are ours. Red are Peeps. Yellow are Oilies. The lines that are still white are standby. If anything else comes within two million klicks the guidance system will track and identify it, and one of the spare birds will lock on."

  The warmth was spreading. That had been the biggest and most important item on Margie's Christmas list, and the one she had been least sure of getting. Now the sons of bitches survived at her pleasure!

  "Thanks, major," she said. "I want you to show me how to work this thing, and from then on I want it in your possession or mine, twelve hours a day each, until further notice."

  "Yes, ma'am," he said unemotionally. "And I have something your father asked me to hand to you personally."

  It was a letter, not a microfiche. A paper letter, in an envelope with her name on it in Godfrey Menninger's own handwriting. "Thanks, major," she said again. "Go get settled in, and take the controller with you." As he turned, she added, "Major? Are things pretty bad at home?"

  He paused, looking at her. "Pretty bad," he said. "Yes, I would say that, colonel. They're pretty bad."

  Margie stood holding the letter for a moment. Then she jammed it in her pocket and went out to see how the unloading was coming along, because she wasn't quite ready to get the uncensored word on how bad "pretty bad" was.

  Putting it away did not let her forget it was there. While she
was chewing Sergeant Sweggert out for talking up two of the new girls when he should have been shifting cargo, she was fingering it. When she was breaking up an argument over what had become of a case of flashlights—"Jesus, colonel, I just put them down for a second; I thought one of the other guys took them!"—her hand returned to it. When the mess tent called a halt for breakfast, she could resist no longer, and she took her tray and her letter back into her office and ate while she read.

  Marge, honey,

  You've got it all, everything on the list. But there's no more where that came from. The Greasies have ordered our rigs off the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. It's a bluff. We're calling it. But every drop of booster fuel is now sequestered for missiles until they back down—and then there's Peru. The Peeps have flanged up a phoney "election," and we're not going to sit still for it. So we'll be at full military alert for months to come, maybe longer than that.

  You're on your own, honey. Figure at least a year. And it may be more than that, because the president's being threatened with impeachment, maybe worse—there was an assassination attempt with two National Guard tanks last week. I told him what to do. Declare martial law. Send Congress home. Crack down all around. But he's a politician. He thinks he can ride it out. If he does, that means the rest of his term he'll be trying to score brownie points with the voters, and that means cutting back a lot of important programs.

  And one of them might be you, honey.

  I wouldn't be telling you this if I didn't think you could handle it. But it looks as if you'll have to.

  That was all, not even a signature. Margie sat with the letter in her hands and minutes later noticed that she had forgotten to finish her breakfast.

  She no longer wanted it, but neither would she waste food —especially not now. She forced herself to eat it all, and it wasn't until she had swallowed every scrap that she realized the sound of the camp had changed. Something was wrong.