Worst Contact Read online

  “Sometimes the offer of reward is more significant than the use of threat. Do you think the country you do not wish to name would like your country colonizing planets of far stars before they even reach Mars? But that is a minor point, relatively. You may trust the techniques.”

  “It sounds almost too good to be true. But you said that you are to decide, here and now, whether or not we are to be invited to join. May I ask on what factors you will base your decision?”

  “One is that I am—was, since I already have—to check your degree of xenophobia. In the loose sense in which you use it, that means fear of strangers. We have a word that has no counterpart in your vocabulary: it means fear of and revulsion toward aliens. I—or at least a member of my race—was chosen to make the first overt contact with you. Because I am what you could call roughly humanoid—as you are what I would call roughly humanoid—I am probably more horrible, more repulsive to you than many completely different species would be. Because to you, I am a caricature of a human being, I am more horrible to you than a being who bears no remote resemblance to you.

  “You may think you do feel horror at me, and revulsion, but believe me, you have passed that test. There are races in the galaxy who can never be members of the federation, no matter how they advance otherwise, because they are violently and incurably xenophobic; they could never face or talk to an alien of any species. They would either run screaming from him or try to kill him instantly. From watching you and these people”—he waved a long arm at the civilian population of Cherrybell not far outside the circle of the conference—“I know you feel revulsion at the sight of me, but believe me it is relatively slight and certainly curable. You have passed that test satisfactorily.”

  “And are there other tests?”

  “One other. But I think it is time that I—” Instead of finishing the sentence, the stick-man lay back flat on the sand and closed his eyes.

  The colonel started to his feet. “What in hell?” he said. He walked quickly around the mike’s tripod and bent over the recumbent extraterrestrial, put an ear to the bloody-appearing chest.

  As he raised his head, Dade Grant, the grizzled prospector, chuckled. “No heartbeat, Colonel, because no heart. But I may leave him as a souvenir for you and you’ll find much more interesting things inside than heart and guts. Yes, he is a puppet whom I have been operating—as your Edgar Bergen operated his—what’s his name?—oh yes, Charlie McCarthy. Now that he has served his purpose, he is deactivated. You can go back to your place, Colonel.”

  Colonel Casey moved back slowly. “Why?” he asked.

  Dade Grant was peeling off his beard and wig. He rubbed a cloth across his face to remove makeup and was revealed as a handsome young man. He said, “what he told you, or what you were told through him, was true as far as it went. He is only a simulacrum, yes, but he is an exact duplicate of a member or one of the intelligent races of the galaxy, the one toward whom you would be disposed—if you were violently and incurably xenophobic—to be most horrified by, according to our psychologists. But we did not bring a real member of his species to make first contact because they have a phobia of their own, agoraphobia—fear of space. They are highly civilized and members in good standing of the federation, but they never leave their own planet.

  “Our observers assure us you don’t have that phobia. But they were unable to judge in advance the degree of your xenophobia and the only way to test it was to bring along something in lieu of someone to test it against, and presumably to let him make the initial contact.”

  The colonel sighed audibly. “I can’t say this doesn’t relieve me in one way. We could get along with humanoids, yes, and will when we have to. But I’ll admit it’s a relief to hear that the master race of the galaxy is, after all, human instead of only humanoid. What is the second test?”

  “You are undergoing it now. Call me—” He snapped his fingers. “What’s the name of Bergen’s second-string puppet, after Charlie McCarthy?”

  The colonel hesitated, but the tech sergeant supplied the answer, “Mortimer Snerd.”

  “Right. So call me Mortimer Snerd, and now I think it is time that I—” He lay back flat on the sand and closed his eyes just as the stick-man had done a few minutes before.

  The burro raised its head and put it into the circle over the shoulder of the tech sergeant. “That takes care of the puppets, Colonel,” it said. “And now what’s this bit about it being important that the master race be human or at least humanoid? What is a master race?”

  CONTACT!

  by David Drake

  Making contact with an extraterrestrial would surely be the most significant event in human history, and nothing could be more important. Really? Think again.

  ***

  David Drake, author of the best-selling Hammer’s Slammers future mercenary series, is often referred to as the Dean of military science fiction, but is much more versatile than that label might suggest, as shown by his epic fantasy series that began with Lord of the Isles (Tor), and his equally popular Republic of Cinnabar Navy series (Baen) starring the indefatigable team of Leary and Mundy. He lives near Chapel Hill, NC, with his family.

  Something shrieked over the firebase without dipping below the gray clouds. It was low and fast and sounded so much like an incoming rocket that even the man on Golf Company’s portable latrine flattened instantly. Captain Holtz had knocked over the card table when he hit the dirt. He raised his head above the wreckage in time to see a bright blue flash in the far distance. The crash that rattled the jungle moments later sent everyone scrabbling again.

  “Sonic boom,” Major Hegsley, the fat operations officer, pontificated as he levered himself erect.

  “The hell you say,” Holtz muttered, poised and listening. “Paider, Bayes,” he grunted at the two platoon leaders starting to pick up their bridge hands, “get to your tracks.”

  Then the Klaxon on the tactical operations center blatted and everyone knew Holtz had been right again. The captain kicked aside a lawn chair blocking his way to his command vehicle. The radioman scuttled forward to give his powerful commander room in front of the bank of radios. “Battle six, Battle four-six,” the tanker snapped as he keyed the microphone. “Shoot.” Thirty seconds of concentrated information spat out of the speaker while Holtz crayoned grid coordinates in on an acetate-covered map. “Roger, we’ll get ’em.” Turning to the radioman he ordered, “Second platoon stays for security here—get first and third lined up at the gate and tell Speed I’ll be with him on five-two.” While the enlisted man relayed the orders on the company frequency, Holtz scooped up a holstered .45 and his chicken vest and ran for his tank.

  Golf Company was already moving. Most of the drivers had cranked up as soon as they heard the explosion. Within thirty seconds of the Klaxon, the diesels of all nine operable tracks were turning over while the air still slapped with closing breechblocks. Tank 52 jingled as Hauley, its driver, braked the right tread and threw the left in reverse to swing the heavy war machine out of its ready position. Holtz ran up to the left side, snapping his vest closed at the shoulder. He was one of the few men in the squadron who wore a porcelain-armored chicken vest without discomfort, despite its considerably greater weight than the usual nylon flak jacket. In fact, Holtz was built much like one of his tanks. Though he was taller than average, his breadth made him look stocky at a distance and simply gigantic close up. He wore his black hair cropped short, but a thick growth curled down his forearms and up the backs of his hands.

  Speed, a weedy, freckled staff sergeant with three years’ combat behind him, grasped his captain by the wrist and helped him swing up on five-two’s battered fender. As frail as he looked, Speed was probably the best track commander in the company. He was due to rotate home for discharge in three days and would normally have been sent to the rear for stand-down a week before. Holtz liked working with an experienced man and had kept him in the field an extra week, but this was Speed’s last day. “You wanna load today, C
aptain?” he asked with an easy smile. He rocked unconcernedly as Hauley put the tank in gear and sent it into line with a jerk.

  Holtz smiled back but shook his head. He always rode in the track commander’s position, although in a contact he could depend on Speed to fight five-two from the loader’s hatch while he directed the company as a whole. Still smiling, the big officer settled heavily onto the hatch cover behind the low-mounted, fifty-caliber machine gun and slipped on his radio helmet.

  “OK, listen up,” he said on the company frequency, ignoring commo security as he always did when talking to his unit. He had a serene assurance that his gravelly voice was adequate identification—and that his tanks were a certain answer to any dinks who tried to stop him. His boys were as good and as deadly as any outfit in ‘Nam. “Air Force claims they zapped a bird at high altitude and it wasn’t one of theirs. We’re going to see whose it was and keep Charlie away till C-MEC gets a team out here. Four-four leads, west on the hardball to a trail at Yankee Tango five-seven-two, three-seven-nine; flyboys think the bird went down around seventy-forty, but keep your eyes open all the way—Charlie’s going to be looking too.”

  Holtz’s track was second in line with the remaining five tanks of the first and third platoons following in single file. As each one nosed out of the firebase its TC flipped a switch. Electric motors whined to rotate the turrets 30 degrees to one side or the other and lower the muzzles of the 90mm main guns. The big cannons were always loaded, but for safety’s sake they were pointed up in the air except when the tanks prowled empty countryside. Otherwise, at a twitch of the red handle beside each track commander a wall or a crowd of people would dissolve in shattered ruin.

  “Well, you think we’re at war with China now?” Holtz shouted to Speed over the high jangle of the treads. “Hell, I told you you didn’t want to go home—what do you bet they nuked Oakland five minutes ago?” Both men laughed.

  The path from the firebase to the highway was finely divided muck after three days of use. The tanks, each of them burdened with fifty tons of armor and weaponry, wallowed through it. There was nothing laughable in their awkwardness. Rather, they looked as implacably deadly as tyrannosaurs hunting in a pack. On the asphalt hardball, the seven vehicles accelerated to thirty-five miles an hour, stringing out a little. Four-four had all its left-side torsion bars broken and would not steer a straight line. The tank staggered back and forth across the narrow highway in a series of short zigzags. From the engine gratings on its back deck, a boy with a grenade launcher stared miserably back at the CO’s track while the rough ride pounded his guts to jelly.

  Holtz ignored him, letting his eyes flick through the vegetation to both sides of the roadway. Here along the hardball the land was in rubber, but according to the map they would have to approach the downed aircraft through broken jungle. Not the best terrain for armor, but they’d make do. Normally the tanks would have backed up an air search, but low clouds had washed the sky gray. Occasionally Holtz could hear a chopper thrumming somewhere, above him but always invisible. No air support in a contact, that was what it meant. Maybe no medevac either.

  Ahead, four-four slowed. The rest of the column ground to a chattering halt behind it. Unintelligible noises hissed through Holtz’s earphones. He cursed and reached down inside the turret to bring his volume up. Noise crackled louder but all sense was smothered out of it by the increased roar of static. Four-four’s TC, Greiler, spoke into the ear of his grenadier. The boy nodded and jumped off the tank, running back to five-two. He was a newbie, only a week or two in the field, and young besides. He clambered up the bow slope of the tank and nervously blurted, “Sir, Chick says he thinks this is the turn-off but he isn’t sure.”

  As far as Holtz could tell from the map, the narrow trail beside four-four should be the one they wanted. It led south, at any rate. Hell, if the MiG was what had gone howling over the firebase earlier the flyboys were just guessing for location anyway. The overcast had already been solid and the bird could have fallen anywhere in III Corps for all anybody knew.

  “Yeah, we’ll try it,” Holtz said into his helmet mike. No reaction from four-four. “God damn it!” the captain roared, stabbing his left arm out imperiously. Four-four obediently did a neutral steer on the hardball, rotating 90 degrees to the left as the treads spun in opposite directions. Clods of asphalt boiled up as the road’s surface dissolved under incalculable stresses. “Get on the back, son.” Holtz growled at the uncertain newbie. “You’re our crew for now. Speed!” he demanded, “What’s wrong with our goddam radio? It worked OK at the firebase.”

  “Isn’t the radio,” Speed reported immediately, speaking into his own helmet microphone. “See, the intercom works, it’s something screwing up off the broadcast freeks. Suppose the dinks are jamming?”

  “Crap,” Holtz said.

  The trail was a half-abandoned jeep route, never intended for anything the width of a tank. They could shred their way through saplings and the creepers that had slunk across the trail, of course, and their massive rubber track blocks spewed a salad of torn greenery over their fenders. But full-sized trees with trunks a foot or more thick made even the tanks turn: grunting, clattering; engines slowing, then roaring loudly for torque to slue the heavy vehicles. Holtz glanced back at the newbie to see that he was all right. The boy’s steel pot was too large for him. It had tilted forward over his eyebrows, exposing a fuzz of tiny blond hairs on his neck. The kid had to be eighteen or they wouldn’t have let him in the country, Holtz thought, but you sure couldn’t tell it by looking at him.

  A branch whanged against Holtz’s own helmet and he turned around. The vegetation itself was a danger as well as a hiding place for unknown numbers of the enemy. More than one tanker had been dusted off with a twig through his eye. There were a lot of nasty surprises for a man rolling through jungle twelve feet in the air. But if you spent all your time watching for branches, you missed the dink crouched in the undergrowth with a rocket launcher—and he’d kill the hell out of you.

  Sudden color in the sky ahead. Speed slapped Holtz on the left shoulder, pointing, but the CO had already seen it. The clouds covered the sky in a dismal ceiling no higher than that of a large auditorium. While both men stared, another flash stained the gray momentarily azure. There was no thunder. Too brightly colored for lightning anyway, Holtz thought. The flashes were really blue, not just white reflected from dark clouds.

  “That can’t be a klick from here, Chief,” Speed’s voice rattled. Holtz glanced at him. The sergeant’s jungle boots rested on the forward rim of his hatch so that his bony knees poked high in the air. Some people let their feet dangle inside the turret, but Speed had been around too long for that. Armor was great so long as nothing penetrated it. When something did—most often a stream of molten metal blasted by the shaped explosive of a B-41 rocket—it splashed around the inner surface of what had been protection. God help the man inside then. ‘Nam offered enough ways to die without looking for easy ones.

  The officer squinted forward, trying to get a better idea of the brief light’s location. Foliage broke the concave mirror of the clouds into a thousand swiftly dancing segments. Five-two was jouncing badly over potholes and major roots that protruded from the coarse, red soil as well.

  “Hey,” Speed muttered at a sudden thought. Holtz saw him drop down inside the tank. The earphones crackled as the sergeant switched on the main radio he had disconnected when background noise smothered communications. As he did so, another of the blue flashes lit up the sky. Static smashed through Holtz’s phones like the main gun going off beside his head.

  “Jesus Christ!” the big officer roared into the intercom. “You shorted the goddamn thing!”

  White noise disappeared as Speed shut off the set again. “No, man,” he protested as he popped his frame, lanky but bulbous in its nylon padding, back through the oval hatch. “That’s not me—it’s the lightning. All I did was turn the set on.”

  “That’s not lightning,” Holtz gr
unted. He shifted his pistol holster slightly so that the butt was handy for immediate use. “Hauley,” he said over the intercom to the driver, “that light’s maybe a hair south of the way we’re headed. If you catch a trail heading off to the left, hold it up for a minute.”

  Speed scanned his side of the jungle with a practiced squint. Tendons stood out on his right hand as it gripped the hatch cover against the tank’s erratic lurches. “Good thing the intercom’s on wires,” he remarked. “Otherwise we’d really be up a creek.”

  Holtz nodded.

  On flat concrete, tanks could get up to forty-five miles an hour, though the ride was spine-shattering if any of the torsion bars were broken. Off-road was another matter. This trail was as straight as what was basically a brush cut could be—did it lead to another section on the plantation that flanked the hardball?—but when it meandered around a heavy tree bole the tanks had to slow to a crawl to follow it. Black exhaust boiled out of the deflector plates serving four-four in place of muffler and tail pipe. The overgrown trail could hide a mine, either an old one long forgotten or a sudden improvisation by a tankkiller team that had heard Golf Company moving toward it. The bursts of light and static were certain to attract the attention of all the NVA in the neighborhood.

  That was fine with Holtz. He twitched the double handgrips of his cal-fifty to be sure the gun would rotate smoothly. He wouldn’t have been in Armor if he’d minded killing.

  The flashes were still intermittent but seemed to come more frequently now: one or two a minute. Range was a matter of guesswork, but appreciably more of the sky lighted up at each pulse. They must be getting closer to the source. The trail was taking them straight to it after all. But how did a MiG make the sky light up that way?

  Speed lifted his radio helmet to listen intently. “AK fire,” he said. “Not far away either.” Holtz scowled and raised his own helmet away from his ears. As he did so, the air shuddered with a dull boom that was not thunder. The deliberate bark of an AK-47 chopped out behind it, little muffled by the trees.