But then the seventeenth one flashed over the horizon, zigzagging crazily, and stopped directly overhead. For an instant it seemed to hover, and then it began to fall. Half the lasers had detected it, and they were firing steadily, but none of them could aim; they were all stuck in their last firing position.
It glittered as it droppecLthe mirror polish of its sleek hull reflecting the white glow from the craters and the eerie flickering of the constant, impotent laser fire. I beard Charlie take one deep breath, and the drone fell so close you could see spidery Tauran numerals etched on the hull and a transparent porthole near the tip-then its engine flared and it was suddenly gone.
“What the hell?” Charlie said, quietly.
The porthole. “Maybe reconnaissance.”
“I guess. So we can’t touch them, and they know it.”
“Unless the lasers recover.” Didn’t seem likely. “We better get everybody under the dome. Us, too.”
He said a word whose vowel had changed over the centuries, but whose meaning was clear. “No hurry. Let’s see what they do.”
We waited for several hours. The temperature outside stabilized at 690 degrees-just under the melting point of zinc, I remembered to no purpose-and I tried the manual controls for the lasers, but they were still frozen.
“Here they come,” Charlie said. “Eight again.”
I started for the display. “Guess we’ll-”
“Wait! They aren’t drones.” The key identified all eight with the legend Troop Carrier.
“Guess they want to take the base,” he said. “Intact.” That, and maybe try out new weapons and techniques.
“It’s not much of a risk for them. They can always retreat and drop a nova bomb in our laps.”
I called Brill and had her go get everybody who was in the stasis field, set them up with the remainder of her platoon as a defensive line circling around the northeast and northwest quadrants. I’d put the rest of the people on the other half-circle.
“I wonder,” Charlie said. “Maybe we shouldn’t put everyone topside at once. Until we know how many Taurans there are.”
That was a point. Keep a reserve, let the enemy underestimate our strength. “It’s an idea. . . There might be just 64 of them in eight carriers.” Or 128 or 256. I wished our spy satellites had a finer sense of discrimination. But you can only cram so much into a machine the size of a grape.
I decided to let Brill’s seventy people be our first line of defense and ordered them into a ring in the ditches we had made outside the base’s perimeter. Everybody else would stay downstairs until needed.
If it turned out that the Taurans, either through numbers or new technology, could field an unstoppable force, I’d order everyone into the stasis field. There was a tunnel from the living quarters to the dome, so the people underground could go straight there in safety. The ones in the ditches would have to fall back under fire. If any of them were still alive when I gave the order.
I called in Hilleboe and had her and Charlie keep watch over the lasers. If they came unstuck, I’d call Brill and her people back. Turn on the automatic aiming system again, then sit back and watch the show. But even stuck, the lasers could be useful. Charlie marked the monitors to show where the rays would go; he and Hilleboe could fire them manually whenever something moved into a weapon’s line-of-sight.
We had about twenty minutes. Brill was walking around the perimeter with her men and women, ordering them into the ditches a squad at a time, setting up overlapping fields of fire. I broke in and asked her to setup the heavy weapons so that they could be used to channel the enemy’s advance into the path of the lasers.
There wasn’t much else to do but wait. I asked Charlie to measure the enemy’s progress and try to give us an accurate count-down, then sat at my desk and pulled out a pad, to diagram Brill’s arrangement and see whether I could improve on it.
The cat jumped up on my Lap, mewling piteously. He’d evidently been unable to tell one person from the other, suited up. But nobody else ever sat at this desk. I reached up to pet him and he jumped away.