The young lieutenant addressed as “Cookie-boy” turned an interested glance on the older man. “How did you manage to kill him? Full-day batteries at double strength? Spearhead through the craters?”
The veteran winked at his friends, and said levelly, “Nope. Easier’n that.”
The young lieutenant’s attention was trapped.
“Waited till he went down, and had a goon squad put a blade into his neck. Real quick. Next day, had our coffee without sweat.”
The young lieutenant was still. His face gradually became a mask of disbelief and horror. “You…you mean you…oh, come on, you aren’t serious?”
The veteran stared at him coldly. “Sonny, you know I’m serious.” He dogged down the pork-bolts on his helmet. He was out of the conversation.
Yet the lieutenant continued to protest. He stood in the center of the ready dome, his helmet under his arm, his other arm thrown toward the rounded ceiling fu a theatrical pose, and blurted, “But—but that’s illegal! When they declared the Moon a battlefield, that was the reason, I mean, what’s the sense of using up here to fight, if we still kill each other down there, I mean—”
“Oh, shut up, will you, for Christ’s sake!” It was a lean, angular-faced Major with a thread-scar from a single. beam across the brutal cut of his jaw. “This wasn’t war, you young clown. This was a matter of a man who fought, and stuck too closely to the rules. What you learned in the Academy was all floss and fine, man, but grow up! Use your noodle. What they taught you there doesn’t always apply out here.
“When someone crosses too many wheat fields, he’s bound to find a gopher hole. This Indian stepped in one of those, that’s all.”
The Major turned away, dogged down, and joined the rest of the line company’s officers at the exitport. The young lieutenant stood alone, watching them, still muttering to himself. For with the other men on intercom only, they could not hear what he was saying:
“But the war. The—the war. They said we wouldn’t chew up the Earth any more. The war…up here it’s so much cleaner, a man can fight or die or…but—but they said they killed him on his way down. “He was going home, to Earth, and they killed him—”
The Major turned with sluggish movement in the pressurized dome, and waved a metal-tooled gauntlet at the lieutenant. It was time to move to the units.
The lieutenant hurriedly dogged down, and joined the group. The veteran officer who had first spoken, turned the younger man around with rough good humor, checking the pork-bolts. Then he slapped the lieutenant on his shoulder with a comradely gesture, and they went into the exitport together.
The hi-fi had been screeching constantly for a full three minutes.
Outside, the Blacks and the Whites went into the five thousand and fifty-eighth day of the war. That particular war.
The needles came across all that early morning. In the dead black of the Darkside, their tails winked briefly as vector rockets shifted them on course. No sound broke across the airless cratered surface, but the tremors as each missile struck rang through the bowels of the dead satellite like so many gong-beaters gone mad.
Where they struck, great gouts were ripped from the grey, cadaverous dust of the surface. Brilliant flashes lived for microinstants and then were gone, for without air there could be no flames. Where the needles struck, and the face of the moon tore apart, new craters glared blindly up at space.
At 0830 on the dot, the first waves of armored units spread out from the ragged White line near Sepulchre Crater and advanced across the edge of the Darkside, into the blinding glare of the Lightside. Vision ports sphinctered down into narrow slits; filters that dimmed the blaze of light clicked over the glassene ports; men donned special equipment, and snapped switches that cut in conditioning units and coolant chambers—and turned off the feverishly working heaters.
The armored crabs came first, sliding along, hugging the contours of the moon’s face, raising and lowering themselves on stalk-like plasteel rods.
The Black batteries detected their coming, but not their nature, and the first barrages were low-level missiles that zoomed silently through the glaring sunlight, passed completely over the crabs, and shusssssed off into the Darkside, and space, where they would circle aimlessly till the men from Ordnance Reclamation went out with their dampening nets and sucked the missiles into the cargo hatches of the ships.
But as the crabs flopped and skittered their way toward the Black line, the sonorad was able to distinguish more easily what they were. The cry went up in the tracking cells buried deep under the pumice of the moon, and new batteries were readied/launched! Doggie-interceptors screamed silently from their tubes, broke the surface of the moon like skin divers reaching water’s surface, and began to follow the line of terrain, humping over rises, slipping into craters, always moving out.
The first ones made contact.
Within the crabs, the shriek of rending metal was a split microsecond ahead of the roar and flash of the doggie exploding. Great gouts of flame roared out angrily…and were gone as quickly, leaving in their place a twisted, bloody scrapheap where the crab had been. Another doggie struck. It caught the crab and lifted it backward and up on its stiltlegs, and then it exploded violently. Pieces of bodies were thrown two hundred feet into the airless nothing above the moon, and fell back soddenly.
All along the line the doggie’s were tracking their prey and demolishing them. On the far right flank, one crab managed to train its twenty-thread on an incoming doggie, and exploded the missile before it hit. But it was a short-lived victory, for two others, coming on collision courses, zeroed in and struck simultaneously. The flash was seen fifteen miles away, the roar trembled the ground for thirty miles.
But White’s offensive for the day was just beginning. In streaming waves the foot-soldiers were coming up behind the crabs. They were small pips on the sonorad units in Black GHQ, and though they could not tell if what was coming was human or mechanical, Black continued to send out the doggies.
It was a waste of missiles; precisely what White had been counting on. The doggies homed in, and exploded, hundreds of them, each finding a lone man and atomizing him so quickly, no bit of pressure suit, weapon or flesh could be found. The missiles came down like hail, and where each struck, a man died horribly, without time to scream, with his body exploding inward in a frightful implosion of power and fire. Hundreds died all along the line, and as the doomed foot-soldiers drew the fire, the jato teams soared up from White Central and streaked before little gouts of flame, toward the Black perimeter.
Each man wore a harness over his pressure suit, with a jet unit, to drive him across the airlessness. While their brothers died in flaming hell below them, the jato units soared through the empty sky, above the level of the terrain-skimming doggies, and dropped down like hunting falcons on the batteries.
Each man carried, in a drop-pouch, a charge of ferro-atomic explosive on a time fuse. As they whipped over the batteries, the men released their deadly cargos, directly into the barrels of the thread-disruptors, and sped up and away, back for their own lines. It was futile, of course, for sonorad had caught them, and trackbeams snaked out across the sky, picking each man off like moths caught in a flame. The jato units were snuffed out in midair, even as the ferro-atomics went off inside the disruptor barrels.
Great sheets of metal exploded outward, ripping apart the bunkers into which they had been set. The disruptors shattered their linings, throwing their own damping rods out, and in one hell’s holocaust of exploding ferro-atomics, the entire battery went skyward. Three hundred men died at once, faces burned off, arms ripped loose from sockets, legs broken and shredded. Bodies cascaded from the sky and the steel ran with blood. It was a typical day in the war.