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.
While Sergeant Sweggert was eating he heard two sounds, not very near and not very loud. They sounded like shots. No one else in the mess tent seemed to have heard anything. He scraped the plate of its canned ham and dehydrated eggs, picked up the big chunk of bread, and strolled toward the entrance, still chewing.
There was a third shot.
This time there was no mistake. Some dumb son of a bitch was playing with his piece. You couldn’t blame him — if Sweggert got a Krinpit in his sights he would have been tempted to blow it away, too. But three shots was wasting ammunition. He speeded up and headed toward the perimeter. As he rounded the cook tent he saw a dozen people standing around the uphill emplacement peering up the trail toward the spot where the resupply ship had landed. Others were converging on the post, and by the time he reached it there were twenty, all talking at once.
The shots had come from the trail. “Who’s out there?” he demanded, grabbing Corporal Kristianides by the shoulder.
“Aggie and two grunts. They decided to get another load in before they bucked the chow line. Lieutenant Macklin just took a patrol up after them.”
“So sit down and shut up till they get back,” Sweggert ordered; but it was an order he didn’t want to follow himself. It wasn’t like Aggie to shoot up the jungle. The crowd was getting bigger; Colonel Tree came trotting up, looking like a little China doll, then half a dozen from the mess tent, then the colonel herself. Ten people were talking at once, until the colonel snarled, “All of you, at ease! Here comes Macklin. Let’s see what he has to say.”
But Macklin didn’t have to say a word. He came stepping along the worn place that had become their path, carbine at port arms, looking both ways into the jungle. As he got closer they could see that the two men behind him were carrying someone, and the last soldier was backing toward them, carrying her weapon as Macklin carried his.