Combat Experience
They brought him back to consciousness, even though he had hoped, prayed, begged never to wake up again. He groaned, but he had no voice … not yet. The breathing tubes, pulse monitors, electrodes, and blood-pumping machines provided a flood of chemical and electrical stimulants that kept his biological house of cards functioning—all so that his brain remained capable of planning strategy.
Alliance Command would not let him die until the war was over, and the war would never be over.
“General Schaeffer,” said a voice that remained disembodied because he hadn’t yet been able to open his leaden eyes. “Sorry to disturb you, sir, but the Human Alliance needs you again. The Agrec are on the move. Alien ships have been spotted on the outskirts of Sector 7.”
Schaeffer’s thoughts became sharper, and he felt more alert—primarily because they had added more drugs that worked like a cattle prod on his mind. He opened his eyes.
It was the same as always. Each time he woke up he found himself in a hospital bed that was a nest of life-support systems, IV feeds, and tubes pumping him full of nutrients and pharmaceuticals. Most of his senses had faded long ago, but the smell remained as strong as ever. The place reeked of antiseptics, age, and death—his own death, much delayed.
But Alliance Command used heroic measures to keep General Liam Schaeffer alive because they considered him a hero. Apparently, their only one.
“We need your tactical advice, sir.” Schaeffer’s vision focused on a young, distraught-looking lieutenant next to a more stoic colonel. At least the colonel had the good sense to look ashamed to tap into Shaeffer’s expertise again. The lieutenant said, “No one knows the Agrec the way you do.”
Nurses increased the tempo of the beat on the medical monitors. Colors changed in the chemical fluids that traveled through tubes into his failing body. Schaeffer was no more than a skeleton with a parchment membrane of skin, a handful of still-functioning organs, as well as a large number of artificial ones.
“Let me be,” he croaked. “Already … done enough.”
The colonel spoke in a hard voice. “You have to do your duty for humanity, General. You have more combat experience than any other commander.” His name plate said ARLO; the nervous young lieutenant was DARVI.
A virtual screen appeared before Schaeffer’s face. The medical displays were replaced with tactical projections, star charts, and symbols indicating the enemy Agrec ships. Lieutenant Darvi said, “If we had any other choice, sir, we would take it, but we need your assistance. If you can’t provide us with tactical insight, then countless young soldiers will die—and when they fall, then so will millions of innocent colonists …”
Schaeffer let the breathing pumps charge up his lungs before he gasped, “That’s what you said the last five times.”
The dour colonel didn’t flinch. “And that’s what we’ll say the next five times until the Agrec invasion swarm is defeated.”
Schaeffer felt a sad hopelessness press down at him with a weight greater than the medical machinery. The war with the Agrec had already lasted nearly a century, and he had been there at the beginning.
Defeated, Schaeffer managed to say, “Let me see the projections and tell me what’s different this time.”
He had been only eighteen, wet behind the ears, a mere colony outpost soldier when the Agrec first struck Farvin, the planet where he was stationed. Farvin was a hardscrabble place in its first decades of terraforming. Humans could breathe the air, and terrestrial crops could grow, if given considerable fertilizer and nurturing. The colonists lived in prefab huts, knowing it would be many hard decades before anyone could call the world comfortable. Only fifty outpost soldiers were assigned to watch over the five thousand settlers.
Up until then, the Human Alliance had needed nothing more than a token military presence against unlikely raiders. Farvin was a bleak colony planet with nothing anyone would want to take by force. Thus, they were entirely unprepared when the first alien expeditionary vessel arrived.
Young Liam Schaeffer had stared at the modular warship, a cluster of geometrical pods arranged around heavy engines. None of the Farvin colonists or soldiers had seen any vessel like it. Schaeffer and his comrades were intimidated and confused as the vessel landed on the outskirts of the settlement.
As they gathered around to stare at the sapphire-hulled ship, the vessel opened up and disgorged hundreds of bald, blue-skinned humanoids wearing slick uniforms. The Agrec moved as perfectly regimented soldiers, clustered into discrete groups that advanced with an impossible precision.
The Farvin colony leader came forward, hands upraised to welcome the strange visitors in a quavering voice. The Agrec gunned her down first, then opened fire with incandescent projectile weapons. The aliens didn’t speak, merely wore stony expressions on their mannequin-like faces. Streams of deadly fireworks killed the panicked colonists and leveled the prefab huts as if they were clearing a forest.
Screaming orders to one another, Schaeffer and his companions fired their sidearms, while others raced to the armory to commandeer the colony’s few larger weapons. Fifty soldiers would never be enough.
Young Schaeffer, untried Schaeffer, terrified Schaeffer was certain he would die that day as he watched the massacre. The fifty defenders tried to mount a futile defense, and the local commander howled, “Open fire! Open fire!”
The Agrec marched forward as if in a parade, grouped in units of exactly fifty-three alien soldiers. Even one of those combat swarms would have been a match for the Farvin defenders—and the aliens had a dozen of them. The colony soldiers learned quickly enough that their projectiles could not penetrate the slick armored jumpsuits.
The bald aliens had unprotected heads, however.
Scoring a head shot was much more difficult in the frenzy of combat, but Schaeffer took aim, steadied his trembling hands, and fired five times before he hit one of the aliens. The bullet burst the Agrec’s skull, and the alien toppled to the ground. The other fifty-two members of the combat swarm paid no attention to the loss, but kept marching forward in lockstep, opening fire, killing colonists, killing soldiers, destroying structures. The invaders acted as if they were no more than a janitorial crew cleaning up an inconvenient settlement.
“Hit their heads!” Schaeffer shouted. More than twenty of the outpost soldiers had already been killed, and hundreds of colonists were dead. The Agrec kept flowing out from their ship. His battlefield focus narrowed around him, and his aim grew more precise as he kept shooting. But it was futile.
Tears streamed down his face, and he screamed in defiance with each shot. One more alien down, then another.
In the middle of each combat swarm, though, he noticed that one of the nearly identical alien soldiers looked slightly different. The Agrec’s uniform was the same, the expression and physical build the same, but a rectangular patch on its face was a darker blue. Schaeffer took aim and killed the marked alien. The bullet splashed through its head, and the Agrec fighter collapsed.
To his astonishment, every one of the remaining members in its combat swarm also collapsed like puppets with severed strings. With one shot he had incapacitated the entire group!
At first, he couldn’t find words, then he raised his voice to his surviving comrades. “Find the one with the mark on its face—in the center of the group. That’s your target.”
With concentrated fire, the remaining soldiers made their last stand. The Agrec pressed forward, slaughtering human soldiers and colonists, but Schaeffer remained focused and cool, firing and firing. He took out another one of their “commanders,” which neutralized another group of fifty-three aliens.
The invaders moved like automatons, showing no reaction to their losses, even when two combat swarms had been felled. Schaeffer’s comrades chose their targets and began taking out other swarm commanders—but the aliens kept fighting, wiping out much of Farvin.
When all but three of their combat swarms had fallen, the Agrec finally acknowledged their peril and retreated to their main ship, leaving their dead behind. After they boarded, the modular ship sealed itself and roared upward into the smoke-smeared skies of Farvin.
More than five hundred dead alien bodies lay on the battlefield. The colony was destroyed. Fewer than a hundred settlers survived, and all of the fifty outpost soldiers were killed—except for Schaeffer.
Amidst the shocked moans and the crackle of burning buildings, Schaeffer collapsed onto the raw ground. He sat stunned, shell-shocked, but convinced he had to return to Earth and report what he had learned.
The invaders would surely attack again.
Alliance Command scientists discovered that the Agrec were a distributed hive mind, like a mosaic of components. Each combat swarm consisted of a group of exactly fifty-three units guided by one commander sub-brain. They theorized there were higher and higher orders of over-commanders back at their home world.
Human researchers dissected, probed, and studied the bodies left behind on Farvin, but the key realizations and the vital tactical knowledge came from young Schaeffer’s reports. He was treated as a reluctant hero, given a battlefield promotion, and debriefed incessantly about the actions of the Agrecs.
He had time to repeat his story fourteen times before the aliens struck another human outpost. Unfortunately, his discovery about targeting the combat swarm subcommander was not distributed in time, and the world of Benesar IV was lost with no survivors.
All across the Human Alliance, Alliance Command geared up for a full-scale interstellar war, and Schaeffer was given a small command of his own. His superiors dispatched him with a group of eager soldiers who were pleased to be fighting alongside the hero of Farvin. Not long afterward, when Agrec forces struck a third human colony, Schaeffer was there, yelling at his men to target the lone alien with the discolored face.
Mowing down combat swarms, one after another, they turned the tide of the battle, and as Schaeffer’s fighters charged forward, they were exuberant, victorious—until the Agrecs brought out a new sort of annihilation-wave weapon that sent shock ripples across the human soldiers. Brave troop leader Schaeffer and his men were scattered like leaves in the wind. Ninety percent of the soldiers under his command were killed outright, five percent were blinded, and the rest suffered major injuries.…
Later, as Schaeffer recovered in a Human Alliance military hospital, the doctors told him he was among the lucky ones. Crowded around his hospital bedside, intense advisers debriefed him, wanting to know what he had seen of the new annihilation-wave weapon. They counted on him, extracting intelligence that they could share with their defense scientists.
Schaeffer painted a vivid picture of the new Agrec weapon, and his descriptions yielded details that none of the other survivors had been able to provide. The Alliance Command weapons developers insisted that Schaeffer’s singular insights were key to developing fresh shields.
During the eight months that Schaeffer recovered in the planetary infirmary, military think tanks worked frantically. By the time the med specialists declared him fit for duty and dispatched him to the front again, all Human Alliance soldiers carried special shielding to face the Agrec annihilation-wave weapon. Upper command promoted Schaeffer again, giving him responsibility for an even larger group of faithful and wide-eyed young soldiers who believed he was good luck incarnate: a miracle survivor of two devastating Agrec attacks.
Schaeffer didn’t feel lucky at all, but he went out to fight—and he did survive the next three horrific engagements on fringe colony worlds. He even led a surprise frontal assault that recaptured the devastated world of Benesar IV, site of the second Agrec assault. The image of his iconic raising of the Human Alliance flag in the rubble of the colony, with Agrec bodies strewn all around, made him even more famous than he already was.…
It took the hive mind aliens two full years to adapt their combat methods and protect their distinctive swarm subcommanders. When the combat swarms marched out in lockstep to fight the human troops, the subcommanders wore enhanced helmet shielding—which also made the vital person far easier to identify. Captain Schaeffer directed all of his forces to target the helmeted subcommanders with a no-holds-barred onslaught, something he labeled “holy hell tactics.”
Schaeffer won five more victories that way and showed all other Alliance commanders how similar victories could be won in future engagements. Word spread throughout the military, and the Human Alliance scored many wins against the Agrec before the aliens changed their tactics once more.
The aggressive race seemed inexhaustible and intent on taking over the colonized planets. For their next gambit, the Agrec added decoy subcommanders to their combat swarms, artificially tinting the blue faces of several normal drone soldiers, but Captain Schaeffer had seen enough of their up-close combat techniques that he could still recognize the real target by instinct. He won again.
And the war continued.…
Now, the cobweb-and-muscle remnants of old General Schaeffer lay ensnared in medical safety nets and life-support systems, sustained by a flow of chemicals. He focused on the projections Colonel Arlo showed him.
“All of their new battleships are in a phalanx formation.” The grim officer pointed to the screen. “They are due to penetrate Sector 7 within six weeks. We’ll have enough time to prepare—if you can spot the weak point for us, sir.”
Schaeffer’s head pounded, and he had difficulty focusing his vision. Too much adrenaline mixed with other stimulants thrummed through his system. Eager Lieutenant Darvi—a man who reminded Schaeffer so much of himself when he had been gung-ho about the war—waved to a nurse. “Can’t you give him something for more clarity of thought? We need his mind sharp!”
Schaeffer lifted a feeble hand to wave her away, but the nurse injected something into his IV, and he felt his thoughts grow clearer, more intense, when all he really wanted was to fade into the warm comforting blackness of sleep, release … even death, if they would ever let him have it.
“Can’t you learn for yourself?” Schaeffer asked. Forcing out that sentence seemed as difficult as winning a battle.
“We have you,” said the colonel. “You’re the greatest tactical mind in all matters regarding the Agrec. We don’t need those other think tanks.”
“I already debriefed you …” he gasped. “How much more do I need to give?”
“Until we win, General. Until we win.”
By the fourteenth year of the war, enough Human Alliance colonies had been devastated and enough battles fought that even a summary of the conflict would have filled volumes. The main fury of the war shifted to battles in space, and the tactics of fighting the Agrec changed entirely.
The commanders put Schaeffer—now a colonel—in command of a Behemoth-class warship leading a battle group of fifty destroyers, well-armed cruisers, fast recon vessels, and rammers. His soldiers were superstitiously pleased to serve under “Survivor Schaeffer’s” command. They saw him as blessed, as indestructible—even though he had served as much time recovering in military hospitals as he had in actual combat.
When his battle group clashed with the first Agrec shipswarm, he recognized the imposing modular vessel design, the geometrical shapes studded around bulky starship engines and heavy weaponry. He would never forget what he had seen when the first alien invasion force had landed on Farvin. Now, he realized that the ship he had seen on the innocent colony was one of the smallest in the Agrec space fleet.
The first space clash was a free-for-all, a brawl of scraping hulls and weapons blasts, vented atmosphere, drifting bodies, exploding fuel tanks, wrecked engines. Schaeffer lost more than a third of his ships in three hours, but his battered Behemoth flagship survived. He ordered his surviving vessels to retreat into lightspeed and leave both human and alien wreckage behind.
Schaeffer considered the engagement a debacle, but the soldiers serving under his command cheered, taking the very fact of their survival as proof of his tactical genius. When they got back to the nearest main base, Alliance Command debriefed him thoroughly and paid close attention to his personal impressions, but he had no insights to offer them.
They responded by giving Colonel Schaeffer another battle group, this time with three Behemoths and twice as many ships. They sent him out again.
During the flight to the outer fringe, beyond which—somewhere—lay the Agrec home world, his soldiers and pilots drilled and drilled. Colonel Schaeffer memorized the images of his first battle, trying to tease out which actions were effective and which ones weren’t. Engrossed in the feed, he finally grasped a subtle pattern and thought he understood a familiar set of movements, a carefully uncoordinated dance.
The Agrec shipswarm was comprised of giant vessels and fast destroyers mixed among a large cloud of otherwise nondescript ships. Why carry so much deadwood along in a battle group? As Schaeffer enhanced and stared at the grainy images, he focused on one of those seemingly innocuous ships, enlarged it, and saw a familiar rectangular marking on its hull—a marking the others lacked. And he smiled.…
During the next space engagement—eight months later—Colonel Schaeffer launched into the alien shipswarm with the same excessive, free-for-all battle tactics, but he gave one heavily armed squadron another assignment. Ten of his armored ships soared forward to take out one specific vessel.
When they did so, the Agrec ships in the entire swarm reeled, losing power and command integrity. At once, they drifted in space, aimless and confused. The higher-level subcommander was dead.
The rest of Schaeffer’s battle group showed no mercy and obliterated the alien ships, except for the ones they captured intact for Alliance weapon scientists to study.…
The war continued year after year, but no negotiations took place, no détente—no communication with the Agrec whatsoever. The Human Alliance didn’t even know how the aliens communicated; if the Agrec were a segregated hive mind comprised of discrete smaller swarms, perhaps they didn’t have any kind of language at all, any more than a human hand knew how to talk to a human foot.
If a main Agrec mind existed, it would be located on the alien home world, but no one knew where that was. Obsessive tacticians plotted course projections, back-calculating paths toward a presumed common point, but there was none.
After twenty-five years, the Human Alliance population had become accustomed to the war; the constant threat of alien invasion was their everyday existence. Colonists lived their lives, having long ago given up hope that the conflict would end soon; they couldn’t waste decades just biting their fingernails and waiting.
Political leadership changed, and a pacifist president was elected. Since the outright conflict had resulted in neither victory nor the cessation of hostilities, the new Alliance president proposed sending an ambassador on a mission to track down some representative of the Agrec and conduct face-to-face talks.
The war-weary people applauded the thought, convinced the alien invaders must be as exhausted as the humans were. General Schaeffer—his last promotion because there were no higher ranks to give him—thought it was a terrible idea, so the president appointed him ambassador and sent him out.
Unconvinced, Schaeffer assembled an escort of eight warships as well as his flagship Behemoth. It wasn’t a large enough battle group to bring into a prolonged space battle, but it was enough to put up a good fight, damage the enemy, and possibly escape—if diplomacy didn’t work.
As they went beyond the boundaries of Human Alliance space hunting for enemy ships, the young soldiers in his crew grinned with confidence, sure that “Survivor Schaeffer” could talk some sense into the Agrec. Meanwhile, Schaeffer contemplated everything he had learned in fighting the deceptively human-looking enemy.
He had absolutely no idea how to negotiate with a race that didn’t think in the way humans did, a race that might not even have a language.
Three weeks out, the diplomatic group encountered an Agrec shipswarm, an aggregation of ships five times as big as Schaeffer’s fleet. Because it was his mission, Schaeffer opened a channel and broadcast. “This is General Liam Schaeffer, commander of this … swarm of ships. Are you able to communicate?” He waited on the bridge, but heard no response from the looming alien ships. He glanced at his crew, then turned back to the blank screen. “I wish to speak with your overall hive mind. How can we achieve this?”
After ten tense seconds passed without a response, the Agrec ships opened fire, unleashing new weapons. Gouts of disintegrating energy ripped open the nearest Alliance ship like a high-pressure water hose striking gelatin.
“Open fire!” Schaeffer shouted, and his ships began to fight back, but the new alien weapons bombarded the diplomatic group, obliterating one vessel after another.
Minutes earlier, however, when the shipswarm initially surrounded his diplomatic group, Schaeffer had identified the one nondescript alien vessel that held the hive submind, and now he accelerated the Behemoth. If nothing else, he intended to get up enough speed to ram the one key vessel. From this distance, his artillery would not be sufficient.
His first officer shouted commands, howling at the weapons officers, who did their best to respond. Amidst the alarms and nearby explosions, Schaeffer yelled, “These are new weapons! The Human Alliance has to know about them. We’ve got to dispatch an emergency buoy, some kind of message—”
The first officer grabbed Schaeffer. “Absolutely right, sir. You can tell them everything yourself—get to the lifepod. We’ll take it from here.”
“I will not abandon my ship.”
“It has been an honor serving with you, and I apologize for the mutiny, sir.” The first officer looked around the bridge as the Behemoth picked up speed toward its target. “Crew, please help me assist General Schaeffer in his escape.”
The flagship roared past the other Agrec ships, ignoring them. It outran the disintegrator waves, while the rest of his diplomatic escort ships tried to defend the General … and died doing so.
Before he knew it, Schaeffer found himself unceremoniously thrown into the shielded lifepod and locked inside. The last-ditch interlock systems triggered an emergency backup dump of all records from the flagship’s bridge console. He was able to yell one more time, pounding on the lifepod hatch before the first officer ejected it into space.
If the flagship did ram the key enemy vessel, the rest of the shipswarm would go dead, but Schaeffer already knew that the rest of his escort fleet had been destroyed; the battered and burning Behemoth was the only ship left. It careened headlong among the Agrec ships.
Inside the pod, Schaeffer was tumbled about in the explosive launch, and he grabbed a handhold to steady himself. He spun, disoriented, nauseated, unable to get his bearings, until stabilizers finally kicked in.
Clawing and gasping, he was able to look out the small windowscreen to see the Behemoth collide with the small but key Agrec vessel, decapitating the entire alien shipswarm. Even as the large group of enemy ships fell dead in space, the lifepod raced out into open space.
His locator beacon thrummed into the emptiness. He really had to get home and bring this vital intelligence to Alliance command.
But he was deep in Agrec space, with only minimal engines and life support that would keep him alive for a month … but he doubted that would be enough to return to human-held territory. If he kept the course straight, this lifepod might arrive inside the Human Alliance in a year or so, carrying the data, and his lifeless body.…
Not good enough.
General Schaeffer proved his military genius once again by extinguishing the lifepod engines, reorienting the clumsy vessel, and limping back toward the cluster of dead Agrec warships. He managed to maneuver the lifepod inside one of the alien vessels, where he disembarked. He worked his way among all the dead Agrec bodies until he reached the strange bridge. He spent a week figuring out how to use their star engines, although he had basic information derived from all the previous Agrec ships that had been dismantled and studied.
When he single-handedly flew a stolen alien warship back home—bringing not only the log records from his failed diplomatic mission but also an actual functional Agrec disintegrator weapon for the scientists to study—his legend grew tenfold. Alliance Command added more and more stars to his rank to the point where it became absurd.
And the war continued.
Fifty years after the initial attack on Farvin, General Schaeffer had accomplished everything he intended to do for humanity, and it was time to hand off the war to a new generation. He announced his retirement, and no one disputed that he had earned the right.
The Human Alliance celebrated his career and gave him a send-off attended by an estimated ten thousand people, including all of the still-living soldiers who had served under his command and the families of those soldiers who had died during his various battles.
As Schaeffer compiled his notes for a multi-volume set of memoirs, he looked back at the battles he had fought against the Agrec. Perhaps he was blessed, as the rumors said, or more lucky than anyone in history had ever been.
He was toasted, lionized, applauded; weepy women threw themselves at him, which he would have found delightful, if he had been decades younger and less scarred. Still, it reminded him that once retired, a wealthy and famous man like himself could surely find a suitable woman to settle down with and give him a few pleasant decades to counterbalance the decades of war.
The hours of his retirement celebration were more stressful and exhausting than any combat scenario, but it was the price he had to endure, after which he settled into a quiet and happy retirement.
Which lasted less than three weeks.
A frantic military commander arrived at Schaeffer’s home, demanding to speak with him. Her face was flushed, and she could barely sputter out her words. “The Agrec attacked again, sir! Wiped out two of our worlds—one in Sector 3, one in Sector 6. It makes no sense. We see no pattern.”
Schaeffer drew his brows together. “There’s always a pattern. We just have to study it.”
The officer was frantic. “General, we need your help! Would you come with me, sir? Please?”
Alliance Command refused to let him sail off into the sunset. For years, the Human Alliance used his life, his mind, and endless promises of “this is the last time” like a cat-and-mouse game. They brought him on as an adviser, then sent him to the front so he could see firsthand the unexpected difficulties faced by the beleaguered human troops.
Alliance Command think tanks relied on him for every emergency, even though they had their own tacticians, and by now there were many other experienced commanders. Regardless, the military always fell back on him. Decade after decade.
Schaeffer’s luck finally ran out when he was eighty-seven years old, and he suffered severe burns over thirty percent of his body when his recon ship endured heavy enemy fire. But he was rescued, patched up, and kept alive, though severely injured. And the people still called him “lucky.”
When Schaeffer was ninety-three and barely able to walk, unable to live by himself unless tended by a medical team, he had a massive heart failure. As he collapsed into the dark pain, he thought at least it would be quiet and restful there in death, and the Human Alliance would have to solve their own problems.
But he woke up resuscitated, on life support, to see another grinning officer. “General, sir, I’m glad to see you’re recovering. There’s been an incursion—the Agrecs are using new ships …”
Decade after decade …
They refused to let him die. General Liam Schaeffer was far too valuable an asset, a tactical genius with unparalleled knowledge of the merciless enemy. The human race could not afford to lose him, and so Alliance Command used every imaginable measure to keep him alive.
And each time he gave them flawless advice, each time Schaeffer proved the worth of his tactical knowledge, they were even more convinced of the need to keep using him.…
Now, the eager young officer and the dour colonel leaned over his hospital bed, moving aside some of the tubes and respirator pumps so they could point out the projections. “Surveillance probes have tracked these large phalanx formations, General. Five thousand enemy ships heading into Sector 7 from various directions.”
Now that the drugs made his brain alert and his thoughts sharp, Schaeffer flicked his gaze back and forth, studied the alien warships and the cluster configurations. Because his hands were weak and trembling, he asked the lieutenant to call up projected courses for the incursions, saw a time-lapse of their paths and stops, and watched the enemy phalanxes change course several times. The shipswarms moved in a random, unpredictable fashion.
Schaeffer stared until his eyes watered and his heart pounded, until he saw a faint echo of a pattern, which he recognized. All of the Alliance Command’s genius tacticians had not seen it.
“Can you project their target destination, General?” asked Lieutenant Darvi. “We need to know where to mount our defenses. Where are the Agrec going to strike?”
Schaeffer stared at the ships, sank back into his sterile bed. Why couldn’t they figure it out for themselves? “Let me die,” he said.
“We need you, General,” said Colonel Arlo. “Think of all the lives you could save.”
Schaeffer did think about the lives he might save, and he thought of all those who had died under his command, too—young soldiers with far too much faith in him and not enough faith in themselves. Under any normal circumstances, numerous other experts would have emerged over the years. Alliance Command relied on him far too much.
“You’re never wrong, General,” said Darvi, as if Schaeffer needed encouragement. “Please help us. Look at these projections—you’ve got to have some insights.”
Schaeffer sank into his pillow, feeling the vibrations of the equipment that kept him alive, the unwilling blood circulation, the stimulants, the medicines. Couldn’t Colonel Arlo even look for himself? On the star charts, there were only six potential planetary targets that the alien invasion force might attack, and he saw the obvious track, but by now the hive mind had learned some modicum of deception. He was sure the shipswarms would divert and attack Khuldur, a small settlement of no more than five hundred people. He couldn’t understand what the Agrec might want with the place, since it had few raw materials and no strategic value. Nevertheless, the aliens wanted it.
“Study the projections,” he said weakly, knowing that they would keep coming to him every time he helped them, every time he gave them a correct answer. It had to stop. “They’ll hit Santiago 3,” he lied. “It’s a prize. They’ll try to take that.”
The young officer was very excited. “Yes, Santiago 3! That’s what I thought, but we needed verification from you, sir.”
“Thank you, General,” said Colonel Arlo, “and the human race thanks you for your service.”
Schaeffer’s heart felt heavy at what he had done, the five hundred colonists he had just doomed, but he also thought of all those young soldiers who would die if they engaged in a full battle over Khuldur. Probably far more than five hundred.
If he himself hadn’t been lucky, if he had been killed as a young soldier in that first engagement on Farvin, what would have happened with the war? And what would have happened to the human race? No doubt they would have found some other hero, some other genius … and they would have continued the fight, regardless. They saw him as a bastion, but they used him as a crutch.
But if Schaeffer let himself be wrong, if he proved that he was no longer perfect, maybe they would not bother to keep him alive and keep torturing him for answers. Then they would have to learn how to walk on their own two feet—and win their own damned war.
Schaeffer had already fought his.
As the two officers gathered equipment and notes, prepared to rush off and spread the news that General Schaeffer had spoken, he just wanted to fall back into darkness, warm sleep, and then oblivion.
But he opened his eyes again, needing to do one last thing. He couldn’t just leave it that way. When he tried to call out, his voice was just a weak whisper, but the nurse heard him, and she called the officers back.
After watching the long-term and supposedly random course changes of the oncoming Agrec fleet, he had noticed something. Schaeffer didn’t know how long it would take the others to see for themselves.
The colonel stepped to his bed, wrinkling his nose at the smell of chemicals, age, and death. “Yes, General, what is it?”
“The paths of those shipswarms … not random. After this battle engagement, study the course changes carefully. You might see a pattern.”
Colonel Arlo frowned. “After the engagement, what will it matter, sir?”
Schaeffer exhaled a long slow sigh. “Maybe nothing at all … or maybe it will lead you to the Agrec home world and the primary hive mind. Find that, and you can end this war once and for all.”
The colonel nodded briskly. “Thank you, General. We’ll look into it. But first we have to defend Santiago 3.”
The two officers left as Schaeffer closed his eyes again, hoping the nurse would let the stimulants run out so that he could sleep, so that he could rest.
Surely that was enough? Surely enough at last.