No use talking. I went on: "D. R. check. You bear two seven five, miles twelve."

"Sir, reverse is nine six, miles twelve scant."

"Close enough. I haven't found my opposite number yet, so I'm cutting out forward at max. Mind the shop."

"Got ‘em, Mr. Rico."

I advanced at max speed while clicking over to officers' circuit:

"Square Black One, answer. Black One, Chang's Cherubs—do you read me? Answer." I wanted to talk with the leader of the platoon we were relieving -- and not for any perfunctory I-relieve-you-sir: I wanted the ungarnished word.

I didn't like what I had seen.

Either the top brass had been optimistic in believing that we had mounted overwhelming force against a small, not fully developed Bug base— or the Blackguards had been awarded the spot where the roof fell in. In the few moments I had been out of the boat I had spotted half a dozen armored suits on the ground—empty I hoped, dead men possibly, but ‘way too many any way you looked at it.

Besides that, my tactical radar display showed a full platoon (my own) moving into position but only a scattering moving back toward retrieval or still on station. Nor could I see any system to their movements.

I was responsible for 680 square miles of hostile terrain and I wanted very badly to find out all I could before my own squads were deep into it. Battle Plan had ordered a new tactical doctrine which I found dismaying: Do not close the Bugs tunnels. Blackie had explained this as if it had been his own happy thought, but I doubt if he liked it.

The strategy was simple, and, I guess, logical... if we could afford the losses. Let the Bugs come up. Meet them and kill them on the surface. Let them keep on coming up. Don't bomb their holes, don't gas their holes— let them out. After a while—a day, two days, a week if we really did have overwhelming force, they would stop coming up. Planning Staff estimated (don't ask me how!) that the Bugs would expend 70 per cent to 90 per cent of their warriors before they stopped trying to drive us off the surface.

Then we would start the unpeeling, killing surviving warriors as we went down and trying to capture "royalty" alive. We knew what the brain caste looked like; we had seen them dead (in photographs) and we knew they could not run -- barely functional legs, bloated bodies that were mostly nervous system. Queens no human had ever seen, but Bio War Corps had prepared sketches of what they should look like—obscene monsters larger than a horse and utterly immobile.

Besides brains and queens there might be other "royalty" castes. As might be—encourage their warriors to come out and die, then capture alive anything but warriors and workers.

A necessary plan and very pretty, on paper. What it meant to me was that I had an area 17 x 40 miles which might be riddled with unstopped Bug holes. I wanted co-ordinates on each one.

If there were too many... well, I might accidentally plug a few and let my boys concentrate on watching the rest. A private in a marauder suit can cover a lot of terrain, but he can look at only one thing at a time; he is not superhuman.

I bounced several miles ahead of the first squad, still calling the Cherub platoon leader, varying it by calling any Cherub officer and describing the pattern of my transponder beacon (dah-di-dah-dah).

No answer—

At last I got a reply from my boss: "Johnnie! Knock off the noise.

Answer me on conference circuit."

So I did, and Blackie told me crisply to quit trying to find the Cherub leader for Square Black One; there wasn't one. Oh, there might be a non-com alive somewhere but the chain of command had broken.

By the book, somebody always moves up. But it does happen if too many links are knocked out. As Colonel Nielssen had once warned me, in the dim past... almost a month ago.

Captain Chang had gone into action with three officers besides himself; there was one left now (my classmate, Abe Moise) and Blackie was trying to find out from him the situation. Abe wasn't much help. When I joined the conference and identified myself, Abe thought I was his battalion commander and made a report almost heartbreakingly precise, especially as it made no sense at all.

Blackie interrupted and told me to carry on. "Forget about a relief briefing. The situation is whatever you see that it is—so stir around and see."

"Right, Boss!" I slashed across my own area toward the far corner, the anchor corner, as fast as I could move, switching circuits on my first bounce. "Sarge! How about that beacon?"

"No place on that corner to put it, sir. A fresh crater there, about scale six."

I whistled to myself. You could drop the Tours into a size six crater. One of the dodges the Bugs used on us when we were sparring, ourselves on the surface, Bugs underground, was land mines. (They never seemed to use missiles, except from ships in space.) If you were near the spot, the ground shock got you; if you were in the air when one went off, the concussion wave could tumble your gyros and throw your suit out of control.

I had never seen larger than a scale-four crater. The theory was that they didn't dare use too big an explosion because of damage to their troglodyte habitats, even if they cofferdammed around it.

"Place an offset beacon," I told him. "Tell section and squad leaders."

"I have, sir. Angle one one oh, miles one point three. Da-di-dit. You should be able to read it, bearing about three threežfive from where you are." He sounded as calm as a sergeant-instructor at drill and I wondered if I were letting my voice get shrill.

I found it in my display, above my left eyebrow—long and two shorts. "Okay. I see Cunha's first squad is nearly in position. Break off that squad, have it patrol the crater. Equalize the areas—Brumby will have to take four more miles of depth." I thought with annoyance that each man already had to patrol fourteen square miles; spreading the butter so thin meant seventeen square miles per man—and a Bug can come out of a hole less that five feet wide.

I added, "How ‘hot' is that crater?"

"Amber-red at the edge. I haven't been in it, sir."

"Stay out of it. I'll check it later." Amber-red would kill an unprotected human but a trooper in armor can take it for quite a time. If there was that much radiation at the edge, the bottom would no doubt fry your eyeballs. "Tell Naidi to pull Malan and Bjork back to amber zone, and have them set up ground listeners." Two of my five recruits were in that first squad—and recruits are like puppies; they stick their noses into things.

"Tell Naidi that I am interested in two things: movement inside the crater... and noises in the ground around it." We wouldn't send troopers out through a hole so radioactive that mere exit would kill them. But Bugs would, if they could reach us that way. "Have Naidi report to me. To you and me. I mean."

"Yes, sir." My platoon sergeant added, "May I make a suggestion?"

"Of course. And don't stop to ask permission next time."

"Navarre can handle the rest of the first section. Sergeant Cunha could take the squad at the crater and leave Naidi free to supervise the ground-listening watch."

I know what he was thinking. Naidi, so newly a corporal that he had never before had a squad on the ground, was hardly the man to cover what looked like the worst danger point in Square Black One; he wanted to pull Naidi back for the same reasons I had pulled the recruits back.

I wonder if he knew what I was thinking? That "nut-cracker" -- he was using the suit he had worn as Blackie's battalion staffer, he had one more circuit than I had, a private one to Captain Blackstone.

Blackie was probably patched in and listening via that extra circuit. Obviously my platoon sergeant did not agree with my disposition of the platoon. If I didn't take his advice, the next thing I heard might be Blackie's voice cutting in: "Sergeant, take charge. Mr. Rico, you're relieved."