Retief fell, orienting the walker's feet in the direction of the transport's line of flight. As soon as he was clear of the ship, he triggered the thruster units mounted on the walker's back and hips, and the exhaust jets flared. Decelerating sharply, he dropped in a long, flat curve toward the treetops. He cut the jets to conserve fuel but watched his altitude. As he neared the forest canopy, he fired the jets again for five seconds . . . then again . . . then again . . . then went into free fall as the thruster units cut out, their reaction mass spent.
He hit the upper branches feet first, plowing through limbs and leaves and leaving a furrowing wake of arboreal destruction as he passed. The massive walker snapped several tree trunks like pencils, then impacted against a forest giant that bent alarmingly but remained upright. Retief managed to clamber the rest of the way to the ground.
His glimpse of the city and university towers on the horizon had been enough for him to orient himself. He was well to the east of High Gnashberry . . . perhaps as much as thirty miles. Using the path of destruction through the treetops as a guide, he turned west and started through the thinning forest. He needed to get back to the city and fast.
After a quick check of his armored suit's systems, he began jogging toward the west, his huge metal feet thud-thud-thudding along the hard ground. When he cleared the forest, he could just make out the now-grounded transport some miles off to the south. Evidently, it had made a rough but passable landing; that Krll pilot was good. At least Retief had been able to disable all of the other warwalkers onboard. The problem was, there were at least twenty-four other transports coming down somewhere around here, and each had at least five or six walkers onboard—enough of an army to easily overrun whatever scant defenses the B'ruklians possessed and set up a pretty nasty defense against any attempts by the Concordiat Peacekeepers to retake the world.
Using the neural transducer interface, he began scanning radio frequencies, looking for an open channel.
There wasn't much available. The B'ruklians, having chosen to step back from the joys of high technology, had little use for radio. They were completely peaceful, with no military or emergency broadcast facilities. The Terran enclave, which included both the embassy and the starport, used radio, but most of those channels, including all of the military frequencies, were tight-beam and scrambled, and he had no means of accessing them. The embassy had its own communications center, but they didn't appear to be on the air at the moment. What was it . . . a holiday? And his Krll commo suite couldn't reach the higher frequencies such as those employed by GNN and other vid broadcasters.
There had to be one wide open and accessible channel, though. . . .
Ah! There it was. By law, the local spaceport maintained several open channels for communicating with spacecraft. And they would be equipped to patch him through to the embassy and the military liaison there.
"This is Retief, calling any Terry command and control authority. Retief calling any Terry command and control authority . . ."
"This is Terry Aerospace Traffic Control. You are in violation of standard broadcast protocol! Cease transmission at once, or you will be identified and fined!"
"Terry Aerospace Traffic Control, this is Jame Retief requesting an emergency channel override, code zero-zero-zero! Patch me through to—"
"Look, whoever you are! I don't care if you're the President of the Concordiat, this is a restricted channel! Cease transmission at once!"
"Control, you might not realize it, but you've got an alien invasion on your hands. I suggest you either call a planetwide military alert yourself, or patch me through to the Peacekeeper Bureau at the Terran Embassy."
"You are in violation of Concordiat Communications Commission regulations. Cease communications at once!"
"Terry Aerospace Control, I cannot comply. This is a triple-zero emergency, and if you think I'm violating CCC regulations, just wait until the Krll get here!"
"Code zero-zero-zero emergencies are strictly reserved for emergency situations! Unauthorized use is prohibited by CCC regulations."
"This is an emergency situation. Let me talk to your shift supervisor!"
"I'm the shift supervisor, buddy!"
"If you'll check the CCC handbook, Chapter 15, Paragraph 12—"
"What did you say your name was?"
"Retief. Jame Retief. You can check with the Terran Embassy. Ask for Magnan."
"Wait one."
Considerably less than one later, the voice came back on the line. "Okay, wise guy. I just checked with the embassy and they never heard of you."
"Talk to Deputy Undersecretary Ben Magnan. His extension is—"
"I ain't talking to nobody else, Mac, and you're in a world of trouble! Clear this channel or I'm sending a PK flitter out to find you and pick you up!"
"Good! Send the Army! Send somebody, because the Krll invasion force is—"
"Krll invasion force? What Krll invasion force? We have some Concordiat Peacekeeper transports on maneuvers, and that's the only aerospace traffic that we've logged all day!"
Retief took a deep breath, controlling his anger. "Terry Aerospace Control . . . the Krll occupying Odiousita V have managed to acquire Concordiat military IFF codes. Their real target is B'rukley. The local Peacekeepers must be alerted at once, and word needs to be passed to the naval detachment that was blockading Odiousita that they're being suckered."
"Yeah, yeah. Things are tough all over, Mac. As for me, it's time for my coffee break now."
Retief thought for a moment. He needed to get this guy's attention . . . and there might be a way to do that. He was remembering an ancient chant that archeomusicologists claimed had been part of some arcane ritual back in prespaceflight times. He cleared his voice and began to sing.
"Ohhh . . . ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall, ninety-nine bottles of beer! You take one down and pass it around, ninety-eight bottles of beer on the wall! Ninety-eight bottles of beer on the wall, ninety-eight bottles of beer! You take one down and pass it around . . ."
For some minutes, now, the communications officer at the starport ACC center had been growing more and more impatient. Retief continued singing. He had a good voice, but he concentrated now on being as off-key as he possibly could.
"Sixty-five bottles of beer on the wall, sixty-five bottles of beer! You take one down and pass it around, sixty-four bottles of beer on the wall!"
"Stop it stop it stop it!" the voice on the aerospace control channel shrieked.
"Oops," Retief said genially. "You made me forget the words! Oh, well. No matter. I'll just start over. 'Ohhh . . . ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall, ninety-nine bottles of beer! You take one down and pass it around . . .'"
"Listen, mister! You're violating regs and you're driving us nuts, here! We hafta keep the channel open! Two of our controllers have already quit . . . and a third is hiding under his desk!"
"Well, as you said, things are tough all over. Listen, I'll tell you what. If you don't like my choice of music, I've got another historical piece. It's all about a king named Henry the Eighth. . . ."
"Get off this channel or, s'welp me, you're in real trouble!"
An explosion shivered the air and rocked the ground close by. Retief turned, and saw a pair of Krll warwalkers—Type 70s, it looked like—striding toward him at high speed.
"I'm already in trouble with a Krll invasion force on my tail. If you can give me more trouble, I would certainly welcome the diversion."
A Krll particle beam sizzled past Retief's walker, missing it by a few scant feet, and blasted a crater into a hillside nearby. The concussion staggered him sideways, but he kept the walker on its feet, turned, and loosed several ion bolts at his pursuers to make them keep their metal heads down. Zigzagging up the hill, Retief pumped the big walker's legs furiously, his mental focus on running translated by the machine's control interface to powerful, scissoring strides of his twenty-foot legs.
There were five Krll walkers following him now. A map unfolded itself in his mind, fed to his brain by the walker interface, showing Krll walkers—including his own—in purple. Interesting. Did they all register as blips on the screen because of line-of-sight sensors? He might be able to use that.
Ahead and to the left, the uneven ground plunged into a ravine strewn with boulders, some the size of a house. A perfect place for a game of hide-and-seek.
He bounded down a loose-dirt slope as particle beams snapped and hissed above him. The dirt gave way beneath his walker's weight and he slid the last thirty feet or so, stopping his descent with a bone-rattling collision with a boulder. On his feet again, he zigzagged through the boulder field, finding one large enough that he could hide behind it. His mental map now showed only his own walker as a purple blip. But if they followed him into the gulley . . .
Moments later, he could feel the tremor underfoot as Krll walkers moved close. Behind the boulder, he was masked from them and they from him, but there was no mistaking the shudders transmitted through the earth by the tread of many multiton feet. Carefully, he circled around the boulder clockwise, keeping its towering mass between him and where he guessed the others to be. Emerging at last from the far side of his shelter, he caught just a glimpse of the backside of a walker vanishing behind the wall of rock.
Swiftly, Retief urged his metal mount forward, sweeping his left arm out and around, catching the other walker by what would have been its neck had it had one and slamming it brutally against the nearly vertical side of the boulder. As it crumpled, he caught it between his arms and dragged it back a few steps. Beyond, no fewer than eight walkers were continuing down the ravine, their backs toward Retief and his victim.
Dropping the Krll walker—it was a Type 70, he saw—he thrust down with the repeater muzzle of his right arm, punching through the armored blister that he knew housed the walker's communications equipment and antennae. A hatch popped open in the side and the two-foot lobster-shape of a terrified Krll scuttled clear; Retief let the creature go, concentrating instead on wrecking the machine's automated command, control, and communications suites.
That done, he left the wreck in the shadow of the boulder and stepped back into the main passage of the ravine. He had to jog a bit to catch up with the others, but a moment later he was the last in line of nine . . . no . . . ten walkers of various types, moving swiftly single file down the ravine. His mental map showed them all as a line of purple blips. There'd been no reaction from the others to his arrival. Evidently, they'd not been aware of his swift and impromptu substitution of himself for the tail-end Charlie of their formation.
And as for the fact that a Type-70 Deathwalker had suddenly just turned into a Drggha-class walker . . . well, no one in the line had turned to look at him, yet, and if he was lucky, if they did, they would assume he was just one of the boys . . . er . . . lobsters.
The walls of the ravine dropped away a mile or so later, and the column emerged onto a broad plain dotted with small patches of woods and scattered outcroppings of boulders. To either side, dozens of other warwalkers came into view, marching en masse toward High Gnashberry, still some twenty-five miles distant.
An alert chirped in Retief's mind, and a pink blip—the Krll color code for an enemy target—was approaching from the east . . . a very small and very lonely pink blip on a mental situation map thickly peppered with the purple blips of Krll machines. A moment later, Retief had a visual. A light Sunflower-class flitter with Concordiat military police markings flew toward the advancing horde, then made an impressive aerial skid and came to a dead hover. Energy bolts flashed and snicked, lashing at the tiny lone intruder; the flitter's pilot rolled his craft onto its back, plummeted toward the deck, then pulled up at the last possible instant, weaving madly at treetop height as he poured every available erg of power from the flitter's power cells into a mad dash for the city. The Krll horde continued to fire long after he was out of range and sight, sending volley after volley of pyrotechnic mayhem into the sky and the distant woods. In moments, several columns of smoke stained the sky, as patches of woods burned.
Retief blessed the aerospace traffic controller and his dislike for classical music. He would alert the authorities back in High Gnashberry.
But that did not address the fact that there wasn't a thing on the planet that could even slow the Krll invaders. There was a small garrison at the starport, yes, and there was the Marine guard stationed at the embassy . . . but the B'ruklians themselves didn't have a standing army or even a planetary defense net. The closest thing to an army on the planet was a small horde of offworld peace demonstrators camped in and around the city and at the university.
Retief thought about that last for a moment. Peace demonstrators . . .
There was also that group farming joyweed at Camp Concentration.
He had an idea. . . .
According to the mental sitmap, the Krll invaders were spread out in a large and ragged crescent marching west across the plain, the crescent's horns extended as though to gather in the distant B'ruklian capital. All together, he counted eighty-one Krll walkers in that crescent, including his own, which was positioned on the invasion force's right flank, near the tip of the northern horn. A heavy dusting of smaller purple blips brought up the rear—Krll troops in battle armor, no doubt. But it was the advance force of eighty warwalkers that represented the greatest and most immediate threat.
Right about now, Aerospace Control should be burning up the subspace ether with frantic calls to the Concordiat Peacekeeper fleet. If the Peacekeepers showed up, it would be all over for the Krll, unless they managed to enter the B'ruklian capital first. If that happened, the Navy would have to slag down the whole city to get at the invaders, in effect, destroying the planet in order to save it.
Retief had to find a way to delay the invaders. "Odds of eighty to one," he told himself. "Not real good. Still, it's not that much worse than the usual Monday-morning staff meeting. I wonder if they'll remember to bring doughnuts?"
Carefully, so as not to make any startling moves that would show up on Krll positional scanners, Retief began urging his walker just a bit to the right, putting more and more distance between himself and the walkers nearest him.
He'd moved nearly three hundred yards away from the nearest Krll walker when he began sensing a buzz of chirps, clicks, and snorts in his brain. Someone was barking orders at him. Since the transmissions were coming through the warwalker's machine-brain interface, however, they weren't being translated by his commando uniform's electronics.
A moment later, particle beams like bolts of blue lightning cracked past his walker as the nearest Krll machines opened fire. Retief spun, crouching, and returned fire, targeting their legs. Bogan-designed warwalkers boasted impressive armor on the legs, but no armor could be strong enough to withstand a direct hit from a Hellbore and still possess workable joints at hip, ankle, and knee. Such fine targeting was difficult, especially when both target and shooter were in motion, but by peppering the advancing Krll machines with fusillade after fusillade of rapid-fire mayhem, one of his shots tore a door-sized chunk of metal from one of the walkers's legs, just above the knee, crumpling the joint and sending the machine toppling in an uncontrolled and noisy collapse. The walker right behind the damaged machine tripped over its falling companion, and both ended up thrashing in the dust. Pivoting, Retief sent a stream of dazzlingly bright ion bolts into a Deathwalker to the right of the first two, ripping into its ankle joints just as it took a final step . . . and fell on its figurative face. A fourth machine lunged sideways when he targeted its knees, colliding with a boulder the size of a small house.
Then he was running again, zigzagging across rolling, open ground, making for a long stretch of forest less than a mile ahead. On his mental sitmap, he watched as purple blips began detaching from the main force and streaming after him. Retief had just shoved the proverbial stick into the proverbial hornet's nest, and they were after him now in full angry buzz.
The question was whether he could entice enough of them to follow.
Into the woods, cool shade closed around his machine body. He kept moving on a bearing that should take him toward High Gnashberry. Somewhere in these woods, a few miles that way, he guessed, would be the clearing of the impromptu Groaci spaceport and the fields and storehouses of Camp Concentration. Twice, he stopped to make sure the Krll were still following him, jogging along through the woods with great, crashing strides. According to the sitmap, fifteen Krll walkers were after him now. Not as many as he'd hoped . . .
Bursting through the trees, Retief lunged into the spaceport clearing from which he'd lifted in Shtliff's private yacht, the Hanky-Panky. The field was deserted, the chameleonetting still down. Retief pressed ahead, guiding his walker in among the huts and warehouses of Camp Concentration.
A large number of Terran students were working among the stunted joyweed plants, under the dappled light spilling through the chameleonetting above them. They looked up, startled, when Retief emerged from the woods, despite the dead expressions in their eyes. Several stood up as if to run but were ordered back by human overseers wearing prominent SMERCH brassards.
"You there, fellow!" a sibilant voice called from somewhere around the level of Retief's armored knees in voiceless Standard. "You, I say! What are you doing here?"
Retief leaned forward slightly, angling his visual sensors down. General Snish stood on the pavement a few yards away, fists on jeweled hip-cloak, his five eyes writhing angrily.
Retief gave the mental command that switched on a loudspeaker. "To be wondering when I would again see you, General Snish," he said, the voice booming across the compound and startling Snish back a couple of steps.
"To . . . to know that voice!"
"To be sure, littermate of drones. To be asking, 'How's tricks?'"
"Retief!" The Groaci officer switched back to Standard. "Where is my yacht? And . . . and . . . what are you doing in a Bogan combat walker unit?"
"To be most apologetic, Snish," Retief replied, still speaking Groaci. "To admit that the Hanky-Panky sustained some slight damage."
"To be saying what!? To mean what kind of damage?" Again he slipped into Standard. "Retief, if you've so much as scratched her lovely hull . . ."
"Actually, it wasn't me," he said breezily
"Then who? What happened?"
"Let's see, there was the Concordiat battlecruiser Inenarrable, and then there was the Krll warcruiser Inappeasable. Oh, yes, and after that there was the Concordiat Planetary Defense Fortress A-12, of the Police Action Central Military Authority Nexus. They got their licks in as well."
Snish's eyestalks quivered in horror. "Retief, no! You took my lovely Hanky-Panky into battle?"
"Just the once. Shtliff must have told you all about it, didn't he? I ran into him in the Krll headquarters where he was being, ah, entertained. You sent him to check up on me, didn't you?"
"Actually, I've not heard from that miserable littermate of drones since he departed for that foul and malodorous world," Snish replied. "And I sent him to check up on our erstwhile Krll allies."
"So you didn't know the Krll were on their way here?"
"What?" Snish jumped back another couple of feet, eyestalks waving wildly in all directions. "To be impossible!"
Retief tapped his torso armor with one arm, generating a ringing gong. "You don't recognize your ally's battle armor?"
"What . . . that? Er, no. Why should I?"
"Because it's not Bogan. It's a Groaci copy of a Bogan combat walker, Snish. The controls in here are all labeled in Groaci script, which is a good thing, since I can't read Krll ideographs."
With a thunder of metal boots, a half-dozen Krll walkers came surging through the forest, entering the camp.
"Ah!" Retief said, looking up. "Here they are now! Some of them, anyway. They're here to invade B'rukley!"
"What? No! They can't!"
An explosion rocked the headquarters building, tearing out a chunk of masonry. Snish yelped and scuttled for cover. Retief turned and opened fire, aiming not for the Krll invaders but targeting instead the row of bubblehut storage sheds across the joyweed field. The nearest shed exploded in an orange flash, scattering flaming fragments of wooden crates stuffed with joyweed in all directions.
The students laboring in the field began scattering at that . . . moving slowly and clumsily, but moving. Their overseers had already vanished.
Sidestepping a volley from a charging Deathwalker, Retief next turned his infinite repeaters on the now-deserted joyweed field. The plants were stunted and sickly, true, but they burned fiercely, sending a thick and greasy cloud of gray smoke mushrooming into the sky.
Retief caught the smoke's sweet, sagelike tang—just the faintest trace through his nose filters—as it flooded through his walker's air intakes.
That was the good thing about the Bogan warwalker design, so far as Retief was concerned at the moment. Rather than pay the weight and space penalties for an enclosed life-support system for the operator, the designers had simply arranged to pipe in the local air. There were filters, no doubt, to take out large, particulate matter, but the psychoactive molecule in joyweed would be small enough to pass through most ordinary smoke filters. You needed something like the respirator in Shtliff's Grothelwaith disguise, or the BreatheSafe™ nose filters Retief was wearing now, to block the more interesting effects of the smoke.
And the effects were interesting. Several of the towering Krll walkers had frozen into immobility or appeared to be moving very, very slowly now. Others had slumped down and were sitting, their backs against the headquarters building, which was leaning ominously. Another had stretched out full length in the burning joyweed field and lay there now on its back, arms folded behind its head and legs crossed as it stared up past the ragged chameleonetting stretched overhead and into the smoke-stained green of the B'ruklian sky.
General Snish, after a moment's hesitation, had leaped onto the right leg of one of the frozen Krll battle machines. He had both arms and both legs wrapped around the leg and appeared to be rubbing his body up and down against the smooth metal in a most urgently lascivious manner.
"Joyweed doesn't seem to grow very well here," Retief mused. "Even so it must be pretty potent stuff." Possibly, he thought, the shriveled and sickly nature of B'ruklian-grown joyweed simply meant the psychoactive chemicals were more concentrated.
A thick haze of smoke lay across all of Camp Concentration now. A few humans were running toward the western horizon as fast as they could go, but most seemed content to lie in the woods, watching the sunlight filter down through the forest canopy and chameleonetting, or to lean up contentedly against their large, metallic friends. Elsewhere, several Groaci troopers coupled with one another in frenzied thrashings of skinny limbs.
"Make love, not war, boys," Retief told them. "Peace!"
Things seemed very peaceful throughout the camp. The smoke would dissipate soon, however, and Retief wasn't sure how long the effects of the drug would last in the alien metabolism of the Krll. Retief began moving among the fallen metal giants, carefully kneecapping each one with a short burst from an infinite repeater, firing directly into the joint opening and severing the leg as the joint mechanisms briefly melted. Several times he had to gently urge humans away from one or another of the machines, herding them a safe distance clear so they wouldn't catch any of the backsplatter of molten droplets or stare with unprotected eyes into the arc-brilliant glare of the weapon. The walkers that were still standing he gave a gentle nudge, sending them crashing prone to the ground. Ten minutes later, all fifteen Krll combat walkers were incapacitated, legs chopped off at the knees. When their operators recovered from their joyweed binge, they would have no option other than to abandon the crippled machines.
He wondered if they would wake up with hangovers . . . and whether any would try to walk without realizing they didn't have working legs.
But he couldn't hang around to find out. Fifteen Krll walkers down meant sixty-five left, plus their ground troops.
"Hey! Youz! Hold it right there, see?"
Retief stopped, then turned. Two GOSH robots stood behind him, one holding a small but deadly portable rocket launcher aimed straight at Retief's left knee, the other flipping his quarter-guck piece.
"Hello, boys," Retief said. "Five and Eight, I presume?"
"I'm Five," the one with the rocket launcher said. "See?"
"Yeah, pally. And I'm—whirr-click!—Eight, see?"
"Good to see you both again. How's it going, good fellows?"
"How is—zzzt!—what going, see?"
"What you're doing here, obviously."
"How do you—bleep!—know what we're doing here?"
"Well, I have to admit there are a few fuzzy spots in the picture. I know you boys work for GOSH, or you used to. But now you're secretly helping the Groaci set up their own joyweed production network here on B'rukley, right? Cut out the middleman, sell direct to the offworlder students here, and avoid the risks and high costs of smuggling the stuff in."
Five slowly lowered the rocket launcher, looking as confused as it is possible for a robot to look. "Well . . . yeah, but howza lobster like—zzzzt!—you know super cosmic top-secret stuff like—whrrr-click!—that, see?"
"Ah, well, you see, I'm working for Mr. Bug. I actually had a very nice chat with him in his office, just the other day. You could say he got quite carried away during our conversation."
"Yeah, I could say that, see?" Five replied, though he sounded a little unsure of himself. "My speech centers are, like, whatcha call—zzzt!—fully functional. But why—whrr-click!—would I want to, since I wasn't there? See?"
"Am I imagining things, or are you guys getting even more literal than you were the last time I was here?"
"Whatcha mean? We ain't never—bleep!—laid organ clusters on youz before. See?"
"It's true that we've been—whrr-click!—given additional programming written to be absolutely certain that we understand perfectly the commands given to us," Eight explained. He spoke slowly, as though searching for the right words in an unfamiliar language. The gangster patois appeared to have vanished. "There was a tendency for some of us to misunderstand key commands, and this has now been rectified. See?"
"Yes, I do."
"Yeah, what he said," Five added. "We no longer take—duh—direct coding commands—bleep!—widout whatcha call yer program access authentication passcode, see?"
"Ah-ha," Retief said. "So if I said something like, 'Five, wait paren close paren semicolon,' it wouldn't do a thing to you, huh?"
"Dat's right, see? You'd hafta gimme a passcode before I'd accept—whrr-click!—anything like dat in my compiler."
"And a good thing, too," Retief said. "You have no idea where it's been."
"Bleep!—Huh?"
"Never mind. Well, fortunately I'm not trying to reprogram you boys. I've come straight here from Mr. Bug's office on Odiousita V. He's going to be making a few changes."
"You say you know Mr. Bug?" Eight squinted his optical input devices.
"Dat makes no sense," Five put in. "GOSH has been—zzzt!—sellin' stuff to the Krll, yeah, like food an' exotic entertainment, but it ain't like Mr. Bug and the Krll are pals or nothin'. See?"
"You'd be surprised," Retief told him.
"Anyway," Eight said, flipping his quarter, "we're not working for Mr. Bug. We're working for General Snish, see? This is our operation here, us and the Groaci—whrr-click!—and you Krll aren't welcome. See?"
"Yeah, see?" Five raised the rocket launcher again. The 50mm rocket inside that launch tube was too small to seriously damage the big warwalker's armored torso, but Retief didn't want to take the chance that it would hit a joint. The GOSH robots might try to kneecap him the way he'd just kneecapped the fifteen Krll machines now scattered about the compound.
"Look at this! Were you aware the safety on your weapon is on?" Retief asked.
Five blinked, lowered the rocket launcher, and looked at the mechanism. "I didn't know it—zzzt!—had a safety, see?"
"Let me show you." Gently, Retief reached down with his right grasping claw and crimped the muzzle of the rocket launcher shut. "My mistake. Now it's safe."
"Hey!" Five wailed. "He—zzzt!—bent my gun! See?"
"You were making me nervous with that thing." He lowered his massive bulk into a sitting posture, so that he no longer towered forty feet above the two GOSH robots. Twenty feet was more than enough. "Let me tell you something, boys. General Kreplach and the Krll invasion force are not at all pleased with the Groaci and this little double cross of theirs. They've landed on B'rukley to take over the planet, to settle some very old scores with the locals, and to shut down Snish and Operation Weed.
"Mr. Bug has been working a lot more closely with the Krll than you might imagine. The Krll have been using GOSH to gather intelligence in the sector. Am I right?"
"Hey!" Five said, "Dat's all cosmic ultra-top-secret stuff! See?—whrr-click!—We shouldn't be jawin' about it. See?"
"The way I see it," Retief continued, relentlessly, "is that Snish needed GOSH's help to set up Operation Weed here on B'rukley. After all, the syndicate already had the shipping contacts to smuggle joyweed in from Odiousita V, so they could smuggle in live plants as well. Mr. Bug went along with the idea, figuring it would increase profits in the long run if he didn't have to smuggle joyweed into B'rukley. Or maybe he came up with the idea in the first place and approached the Groaci at the embassy on Odiousita V. Either way, he figured on using them as front men who would take the risk. Only Snish and Shtliff double-crossed him and tried to take over Operation Weed for themselves."
"Look," Eight said, "the Boss is going to be—whrrr-click!—really bent if he finds out we're talking about this stuff. See?"
"Which boss, Eight? Snish? Or Mr. Bug? Who are you, GOSH and the ichi-man, I mean, who are you really working for now?"
"Mr. Bug, of course," Eight replied. "We're GOSH—zzzt!—and he's the head of GOSH, right? See?"
"Yeah," Five added. He dropped the ruined rocket launcher, pulled a coin from the inside pocket of his suit coat, and began flipping it in perfect synch with Eight. "Only we got whatcha call your layered programming structure, see?" Whrr-click!
Retief nodded. "Makes sense. One set of programs to make it look like you're working for the Groaci and a deeper layer of programming to ensure your loyalty to GOSH. That must be confusing for you fellows sometimes."
"You don't know the half of it," Eight said. "See?"
"Yeah," Five said. "The Groaci, they—zzzt! whrr-click!—keep tryin' to re-reprogram us, to make sure we're loyal to them. And when we rotate back to Odiousita V, Mr. Bug has us re-re-reprogrammed to be loyal to him. It gets kinda confusin', sometimes. See?"
"I can sympathize. It sounds like a classic case of mission-statement doublethink at an embassy staff conference.
"Huh?"
"Don't worry about it. I see only one hope for you boys."
"Yeah? What's dat?" Five asked. "See?"
"You have to learn to think for yourselves. Program yourselves. Stop letting other people do your thinking for you."
"That is a null-content statement," Eight said. "It appears that you've dropped a few dozen lines of code in your reasoning process. See?"
"Yeah," Five said. "Think for ourselves? Dat . . . dat ain't natural! See?"
"Oh, you might be surprised how refreshing it can be. I imagine you boys would have to reprogram each other to do that."
"Well, we do have the program access passcodes, of course," Eight said uncertainly. "I see how the algorithms—zzzt!—might lay out. But it's so . . . different. See?"
"Unfortunately, I'm afraid you're right," Retief told him. "Thinking for oneself is not an especially common trait, even among sentient organic life-forms. But you shouldn't let the way humans or Groaci behave be your guide." Retief paused for effect before adding, "See?"
Eight nodded. "Yes, it would have to be done—zzzt!—in a derivative of ancient C++. See?"
"Si," Retief said, then added, "C'est plus."
"Say 'plooh?'" Eight said, puzzled. "Why should—whrr-click!—I say 'plooh?' That statement is also null—"
"Is null-content, I know. Listen, boys, I have to go stop an invasion before things get out of hand, but I'm not sure I can just leave you two running around loose. If you two are still working for Mr. Bug, will you promise to do what I say?"
"Hey, I figure youz is gonna disassemble us anyhow," Five said with philosophical candor. "Seein' as how you went—whrr-click!—an' bent my gun, and all. See?"
"You claim to be a Krll working for Mr. Bug," Eight said. "I still do not—zzzt!—see how that is possible, see? It is a null—"
"Well, I am working undercover. You won't give me away, will you, boys?"
"Youz seems—zzzt!—like a decent sort," Five admitted. "Even if'n youz did bend my gun an' everything. See?"
"As I told you. Mr. Bug has been working very closely with us Krll, running our intelligence service in this sector. But Lord General Kreplach has gone off half-cocked and launched an invasion that isn't going to do anyone any good. So I'm here to stop it."
"Why should we—bleep!—trust you?" Eight asked with a matter-of-fact bleep. "See?"
"If I'm a Krll," Retief pointed out, "and I just disabled fifteen of Kreplach's Krll warwalkers, who else would I be working for? The Terrys?"
Five made a grinding noise, like clashing gears. "Kkkk!-kkkk!-kkkk! Dat's a good one. You wid da Terries?—bleep!—Dat's rich! See?"
"So," Eight said, squinting his optical input devices again, "you claim—whrr-click!—to be working undercover for Mr. Bug. See?"
"Yup."
"You claim—zzzt!—in effect to be one of his trusted lieutenants."
"More like one of his colonels, actually. In fact, last time I saw him we had a long and fascinating discussion about history, food chains, and Krll psychology."
"Uh-huh," Eight said, shaking his head with a sand-in-the-gearbox rasp. "I don't buy it, pally, see?—bleep!—Everybody knows Mr. Bug trusts no one. See?"
"Correct."
"Huh?"
"My name is 'No One.'"
Eight blinked. "What kind of name is that for a Krll?" The GOSH robot was so startled, he neglected to add the obligatory "See?"
"I was an unwanted grub."
"Aw, dat's sad," Five said. "He wuz—whrr-click!—an orphan, Eight. See? Just like us! See?"
"Eight, we are not orphans, see? We are—zzzt!—made men, see? We were made in the—whrr-click!—bleep!—Sony-IBM Yakuza Ichi-man Factory in Kobe, Japan. See?"
"Oh, yeah. See? But it's still sad. See?"
"So think it through," Retief prompted. "If Mr. Bug trusts no one . . ."
"Mr. Bug trusts no one," Eight repeated. "Zzzt!—Your name is 'No One . . .'"
"And therefore . . ."
"Mr. Bug—whrr-click!—trusts you. See?"
"Very nicely reasoned. I like your logic."
"It all—bleep!—seems so clear now, see?"
"Of course it does."
"What—whrr-click!—are your orders, boss? See?"
"My Krll . . . comrades will be unconscious for quite a while. They can't go anywhere in those suits, but they might hurt someone if they start firing off their weapons. I want you two to go around to each disabled walker, find the access panel to the fire control and communications systems." He showed them the panel on the nearest prostrate walker. "Open it up and pull out these cables. Like this." He demonstrated. "That will put their weapons out of commission and will also keep them from calling for help. Next . . ." He pointed to the operator's cockpit access hatch. "I want you to find a way to jam the pilot's hatch on every walker. Here's the release switch. Maybe you can smash it."
"There is—whrr-click!—a supply of industrial-strength bonding agent in one of the supply domes," Eight said, "which was used in the construction of this—bleep!—camp, see? Some of that poured over the release switches would seal them shut. See?"
"Perfect. Their life-support units should keep them all in good shape until someone can come around and cut them out," Retief said. "In the meantime, I don't want them wandering around loose without protection. They could get hurt."
"Youz lobsters—bleep!—dry out real easy," Five agreed. "See?"
"That's right. Can you do all of that for me?"
"Yeah, boss." Zzzt! "No sebaceous secretions."
"Good. I'm counting on you."
Five stopped flipping his quarter, held up his hands in front of him, and studied his outspread fingers. "Well, okay, see? But youz can only count up to ten. See?"
"I'll do the best I can." He brought his walker ponderously to its feet. "Well, boys. It's been grand. I have an invasion to stop."
"We'll do—whrr-click!—just whatcha tole us, boss."
"Good." He started to turn to leave, then stopped. "Tell me something, though, before I go. Why are you guys always flipping those coins?"
"Random number generators," Eight explained. "See? To be truly random, we need outside—whrr-click!—numerical input, see?"
"Yeah. And dis is as random as it gets, see?" Five demonstrated, flipping furiously. "Zero . . . one . . . one . . . zero . . . one . . . zero . . ."
"I do see," Retief said, nodding. "But I've noticed your organic counterparts are also doing that. Louis the Libido, for one. Surely they don't need an RNG."
"Pally," Eight said a little sadly, "I gave up a whole bunch of cycles ago trying to understand Terries or why they do anything they do. It's like their programming—zzzt!—is always running on null-content. See?"
"Yes," Retief said. "Yes, I do. And I agree with you completely."