The walls of the conference room were filled with holograms of arid rocky country and a blazing bronze sky. I was tempted to shield my eyes from the sun, but the brightness actually was never high enough to cause real glare.
“The nearest Hegemony base to Bititu is in the Justice system,” I pointed out. “That’s only a dozen light-years away. The enemy could send a battle fleet to Bititu before we’ve secured the asteroid.”
The admiral flicked its forked tongue in and out almost faster than the eyes could follow, its way of working off nervous energy.
“We will remain in the Jilbert system until you have secured the asteroid, never fear,” said the admiral. “My fleet is powerful enough to take care of any Hegemony attempt to reinforce Bititu.”
I remembered the way the Tsihn fleet had bolted from Lunga and stranded us.
“In point of fact,” said the admiral, tongue flicking blurrily, “we are hoping that the Hegemony will attempt to interfere. It will give us an opportunity to destroy one of their fleets.”
I was glad to hear that it was so confident. Glancing along our end of the conference table to Frede and my other officers, I saw that none of us humans shared its opinion.
My battalion spent most of the flight in training. We converted the troopship’s passageways and compartments into mock-ups of the tunnels and caves we expected to find on Bititu and practiced storming through heavily defended positions, day after day. There was no room for subtlety in our tactics. It was just brute force and firepower. I knew the casualties would be high.
“Why doesn’t the fleet just blow the goddamned asteroid out of existence?” Frede asked one night in our bunk. “Why do we have to take it?”
I had no answer, except, “Maybe the Commonwealth wants to use it as a base for themselves after we’ve driven out the Hegemony.”
“You know what I think,” she asked, then went on without waiting for my reply, “I think it’s those double-domed scientists. They want Arachnoid specimens to study, so we get stuck with the job of trying to capture some of them.”
“But according to our briefings, the Arachnoids fight to the last one,” I said.
“Tell it to the scientists.”
“Still,” I said, thinking aloud, “the fleet could bombard the asteroid before we go in, pound it as hard as they can. It wouldn’t hurt the Arachnoids deep inside the rock, but it could knock out any of them up by the surface.”
“And make our landing easier,” Frede said.
But when I took up the question with the admiral’s chief aide, a reptilian about my own size with beautiful multicolored scales, the answer was: No preliminary bombardment. It would merely alert the Arachnoid defenders and delay our landing.
“But once we show ourselves in the Jilbert system, several light-hours away from the asteroid, won’t that alert them?” I asked.
“No preliminary bombardment,” the reptilian repeated. “The plan is set and will not be changed.”
I demanded the right to ask the admiral about it. Permission denied. I got the impression that the strategists who had planned this operation wanted to capture Bititu as intact as possible. They were perfectly willing to spend our lives in exchange for killing off the defenders without wrecking the asteroid itself.
I had other ideas.
I assigned Frede and my other officers to studying the pictures of Bititu as minutely as possible. I myself spent most of my nights going over those images, pinpointing each spot on that pitted bare rock that looked like an air-lock hatch or a gun emplacement. Then, one by one, I assigned each of those targets to one of our heavy-weapons platoons.
My plan was to knock out those surface defenses as we rode toward the asteroid in our landing vehicles. Instead of sitting inside and waiting passively until we touched down on the surface, I ordered my weapons platoons to zero in on specific targets and destroy them while we were in transit from the troopship to the asteroid.
Otherwise, I feared, the Arachnoid defenders would blast our ships out of the sky before we reached the rock.