As we neared the Jilbert system I worked the troopers harder and harder. Little sleep and less rest. We raced through the ship’s passageways every day and almost every night. When we were not physically assaulting our mock targets we were studying the imagery of Bititu, familiarizing ourselves with every crevice and hollow of its surface, picking out the precise spots where each landing vehicle would touch down on its surface.
Some of the troopers began to complain that by the time we reached our target they would be too tired to fight. I drove them harder.
“We go relativistic in six hours,” the Tsihn liaison officer told me at last. “Then two or three hours to the point where you embark for the asteroid.”
I got my troops ready. We marched to the loading docks where our landing vehicles waited, singing ancient songs of battle and blood. We got into our armored space suits, using the buddy system to check each other carefully. The suits had been anodized white at my insistence; in the dimly lit tunnels of Bititu we had to be able to see each other. No one knew what the visual range of the Arachnoids was, whether white stood out as clearly to them as it did to us, but I was determined to avoid killing ourselves with friendly fire.
I put the heavy-weapons platoons in the first of our forty landers, with the other platoons’ landers coming in behind them. I put myself in the first of the weapons platoons.
As the troops clambered aboard the landers, awkward in their heavily armored suits, Frede came up beside me, her helmet visor raised, an odd, expectant smile on her face.
“Well, we’re as ready as we can be,” she said, her voice trembling ever so slightly.
“Make certain your weapons team hits every assigned target,” I said. “Especially the air locks. Maybe those spiders can breathe vacuum, but I doubt it.”
“I never liked spiders,” she said.
“Now’s your chance to kill a few thousand of them.”
She nodded inside the space helmet, then slid the visor down and lumbered off to her landing vehicle. I clamped my visor and sealed it. I had done everything I could think of. Now it was us against them, with no mercy expected either way.
The landing vehicles were little more than armored shields with handgrips for the troops and propulsion units hung off their sterns. We pushed off the troopship, forty landers, and slid out into the darkness of space.
“Here we go,” said one of the troopers. I heard his tense, shaky voice through my helmet earphones.
“Another free ride, courtesy of the army.”
“Enjoy your trip.”
“Yeah. You gotta be born to it.”
No one laughed.
The sullen red star off in the distance gave very little light. The dark, pitted rock of Bititu seemed to float out there among the stars, a long way off. And we seemed to be hanging in the middle of the emptiness, barely moving. As I clung to the handgrips behind the forward armored shield, in the midst of the heavy-weapons platoon, I had to turn my entire body around to see the troopship we had just left. Farther in the distance hovered hundreds of battle cruisers and dreadnoughts, sleek and deadly, with enough firepower to atomize Bititu and its fanatical defenders.
We slowly, agonizingly drifted toward the asteroid. I felt naked and alone despite my armored space suit and the soldiers surrounding me. Not a sign of life from the asteroid. Not a glimmer of light. It merely hung there, growing slightly larger as we slowly approached it, a massive elongated chunk of rock, pockmarked with craters and scored with strange grooves, dark and solid and ominous.
I checked the watch set into the wrist of my suit. I had set it to count down to the instant when we would begin firing at the surface facilities. A hundred and nine seconds to go. A hundred and nine eternities.
At last I saw something glint on the asteroid’s surface. The reflection of sunlight? No, Jilbert was too faint and red to make that kind of glitter. Then another, and the front shield of one of our landers flared with the impact of a laser blast. Missiles were leaping from hidden fissures in the asteroid, blazing toward us. Our bombardment plan was instantly forgotten as we began to shoot at the missiles. They exploded in silent fireballs, each one closer to us as we drove onward toward the asteroid.