Strong Arm Tactics (33 page)

“Do cockroaches think?” one of the Welcomers asked, with a face screwed up in disgust, lugging his duffle bag with difficulty past the officers.

“We sure do,” Thielind stated proudly.

The teenaged boy looked from one officer to the other. “
You’re
Cockroaches? What’s the matter? Were all the good nicknames taken?”

“Sir, that is a very old joke,” Borden began.

“Listen, friend,” Thielind interrupted, tapping the boy on the chest, “those bugs are resistant to radiation. They’re hard to kill. They seem to be smart. They’re strong. They have good survival instincts. Maybe they make people sick to look at them, but you wait until after humanity and itterimity and all the others have blown themselves to hell. The next intelligent species to take over the spacelanes is gonna have six legs.”

“Please get on board, sir,” Borden said, as he stood gawking at them. She took his arm to turn him. “This transport leaves in two minutes.”

O O O

Daivid entered Wingle’s laboratory with trepidation. The inventor sat peering down into a sterile table that had the elbows of dozens of micromanipulators sticking out of it from every direction.

“He doesn’t want you here,” Sparky warned him, for the six hundredth time. Since being assigned to Daivid as a sort of aide-de-camp, the blond puppet had been a gadfly, a nuisance and an imposition, all of which he was being now.

“I need Mr. Wingle’s help,” Daivid said, turning to face the puppet with exasperation.

“Well, then?” Wingle’s voice came from behind him. “If you won’t take it from him, then you’d better take it directly from me. Go away.”

Daivid spun back to face the inventor with respect. “Sir, we have a strategic problem that we need to solve.”

The thicket of eyebrows drew down. “What is it?”

“The snow,” Daivid said, tersely, determined not to waste any of the man’s valuable time. “My plan calls for making use of the underground tunnels. Your engineers are laying them out in a pattern for us. The entrances are all well hidden, but they won’t stay that way if the enemy can follow our footsteps.” He held out his infopad, showing a chart on the screen. “I have plotted out the minimum number of paths, with a group of dead ends, to keep the Insurgents confused. Your staff seemed confused when I asked them if they could get the plows out today.”

The big brows rose on the forehead, and Wingle actually laughed. “Plows? Get with the century, young man.” Wingle took him by the elbow and led him to a control panel next to his communications console. “Do you think the snow obediently goes away at the start of season every year?” He pulled open a small gray door and clapped a knife-switch down. Daivid heard a violent crackling sound come from overhead.

“That’s ice melting,” Wingle said. “You can hear it through the ventilation ducts. In another hour or two it’ll be dry out there. Good enough?”

Daivid was filled with admiration. “More than good enough, sir. You think of everything.”

The crotchety old man seemed pleased with the praise, but still exasperated at the interruption. “Yes, well, we’ve had seven generations to work out the bugs. Any one of my people could have told you that they’d take care of it, if you asked them the right question. Now, get out of here. If I never see you again, it’ll be too soon.”

O O O

“This place is huge!” Lin exclaimed. Her voice echoed off the textured orange walls that stretched up three stories to the golden vaulted ceiling decorated with bosses shaped like clusters of carrot greens. Arched doorways over five meters high in each of the four walls let in the winter sunshine to illuminate the uneven plascrete cobbles of the floor. A three-tiered round dais rose in the center of the space. Every wall had brackets for hanging tapestries. Bunny Hug’s friendly face was carved into the walls above the doors and the pairs of arched windows above them, the ends of the exposed beams, even the finials on the long, burnished gold brackets intended to support tapestries on the high walls during season. Beyond each of the four doors were plascrete outlines a meter high that since the snow had vanished were revealed as garden planters shaped like Wingle characters. Lin supposed just before the park opened that they would be filled with flowers and plants from the immense greenhouses underground. She was very impressed by the park. It was vast, but like an iceberg only ten percent of its mass stood above ground. The support facilities had to reach nearly ten stories underground. The tourists would be blown away if they knew how much was there beneath their feet.

“We hold afternoon concerts in here,” said the grounds manager, Tomario Wassett. “It’ll hold fifteen thousand people standing, or six thousand seated. It’s big enough for almost any function.”

“Well, it’s too big for our purposes,” the senior chief said, setting her hands on her hips. “If we’re going to blast the Insurgents into a black hole, we’ve got to contain them in one fairly small place. I haven’t got enough explosives to seed this entire pavement.”

“Ma’am, you’re not going to blow up the
Carrot Palace!
” Wassett said in a hushed voice.

“I’m sure as hell going to try,” Lin said, scanning the structure with a practiced eye. She smiled patiently at the expression of horror on his face. “C’mon, we couldn’t possibly do as much damage as the tourists do. Now, show me where the support beams are located.”

O O O

“Awright, you scum!” Boland howled, standing tall at the head of a hundred Wingle Irregulars, as the troopers were coming to call their made-from-scratch brigade. “You, green elephant! Yeah, you!” he shouted, as a furry jade-colored pachyderm pointed an innocent trunk toward himself. “Yeah! Ginophant! You call that standing in line? The idea is that there’s someone in front of
you,
and you are in front of someone
else.
That way you’re not all walking side by side when I tell you to march!”

“Pretend you’re on parade,” Mose yelled from the head of the second wave. “Do it for the audience!”

“Oh!” the puppets all exclaimed in unison, as though they had just figured out what the big, fat trooper was trying to tell them. Obediently, they formed into two long files, and promenaded through the now-dry main street of Wonder Pavilion, waving at an imaginary cheering crowd.

“You guys suck,” Boland grinned.

“Don’t say such things, you naughty man,” a pretty twenty-something female chided him, slapping his hand as she sashayed by. Her dark blue uniform fit snugly over a pert bottom. Boland grinned, and stretched out to pinch.

“Careful,” Mose said, coming to stand beside his squad leader, “remember they’re not real people. She could be an elderly man with a squint.”

Boland sighed. “You sure know how to take the pith out of a guy’s reed.”

“You hear that, lieutenant?” Mose asked, as Wolfe approached them with Sparky at his heels. “I take the pith out of him.”

“Not in public, please, Mose,” the lieutenant said, with an eyebrow on high. “What you guys do in private is, thank God, none of my business.”

“Sir, you are like cold water upon the hot glass of my wit,” the poet said, with a theatrical sigh.

“Glad to be of service. How’s it going?”

“To be honest, they look weirder than we do,” Boland admitted, watching half a dozen pink flamingoes preening as they presented arms. They flaunted their skinny necks and fluttered long black eyelashes at Wolfe. “Almost terrifyingly weird, in my opinion. They’d scare hell out of any sane opponent, and it’ll be worse when they’re all dressed up. You can see they haven’t all got uniforms yet.” He gestured at a host of costumers on the sideline, who at the moment were fitting out Bunny Hug in his custom-made blues. The boots that went on over his enormous feet would have made good pontoons, and the clear helmet had to be made extra-extra large to accommodate his floppy ears.

“I’m not sure that’s going to matter,” Wolfe said, watching curiously. “The idea is to confuse the Insurgents as to how many ordinary soldiers we have, and then confuse them with a few of the special characters.” He did a quick count. “You’ve got about a hundred.”

“Only a few weapons, though,” Boland said. “We’ve got ten real guns, besides our own armaments, a few target pistols, about thirty fireworks guns, and two spare grenade launchers. I think that’s all I’m going to get.”

“You’ll have to make do,” Wolfe replied. “I’m leaving the largest contingent, along with the greatest number of Cockroaches, concealed around the Inventor’s Workshoppe with Aaooorru. The tunnels have been moved so there is only one access to Wingle’s workshop, the slide under the floor. He’s still our primary focus. Are you going to be able to keep the Insurgents busy until they get to our little surprise?”

“Does this uniform make my tail look big?” one of the flamingoes asked, as they marched past the officers again.

Boland groaned. “That one’s the complainer,” he said. “They really do have their own personalities. And quirks. Yes, sir, we’ll do what you need us to do, if it kills all of us.”

Bunny Hug straightened his uniform and made straight for the small group of humans. “Little Daivid!” he cried, in the deep, friendly voice. “The last time I saw you, you were just this high!” The enormous pink paw flattened the air about a meter off the ground. “You’ve grown!” He threw his arms around Daivid and enveloped him in a huge hug. Privately, Daivid was charmed. To think that Bunny Hug would remember him after all those years, but then he and his sisters
had
been there a month … There was a loud snicker from the other Cockroaches. Daivid turned to glare at Boland and Mose. “Any other objections?”

“No, sir,” Mose assured him.

“I’m ready,” Bunny Hug said, and turned cheerfully to the assembled puppets with one big paw on high. “Everybody, into formation!”

Obediently, all the puppets lined up in perfect rows, without a single mistake or complaint. Boland and Mose looked at each other. “What’s he got that we haven’t got?”

“Respect,” Daivid said. “Earn it.”

O O O

The discipline problems were absent in the corlist’s contingent. He and Ewanowski had their two hundred and ten puppets, many of them armed with real machine guns, running complex maneuvers through the Little Village around the Inventor’s Workshoppe as if they had been doing it for years. Wolfe watched for a while as Aaooorru drilled his ten ‘officers’ in short-burst fire. His was the final defense, the last resistance. Wolfe had made sure to assign him puppets operated by the most skilled operators with the best motor control.

“Don’t waste ammunition,” the corlist instructed them, ticking off the three-count with his extra limbs as he fired bursts of three laser-tag light rounds at his target, a cutout of an Insurgent soldier that had been set up in one of the empty gardens. The red light hit the neck or heart in rapid-fire, flashflashflash, over and over again. He turned his stalklike eyes toward the humanoid puppets, who stared at him impassively, though Daivid knew the operators in their soundproof bunkers deep below were absorbing the lesson. “These guns can fire 650 rounds per minute of caseless ammunition. The magazines only hold a hundred bullets, and we can’t spare you more than one each. Now, all of you try it.”

The semicat was demonstrating a guerilla maneuver. He led a squad of chickens, cats and the Bizarro Twins over the green lawn, pretending to shoot at a target coming up the path, then diving and rolling down behind the food stand on the other side.

“Welcome! We bid you welcome…!” the colorful flowers sang from their pots along the path and on the windowsills. Ewanowski stood up with his paws clapped over his furry ears.

“Can we please turn those damned things off?” Ewanowski roared over the tinny voices. “They’re gonna drive me insane.”

As though an invisible hand clicked off a switch, the voices ceased. “Thanks,” the semicat said to the air.

“Looking good,” Wolfe told Aaooorru, as the corlist left the target practice to join him. “The … uh, it was a great loss to the service when they transferred you to the Cockroaches.”

The corlist made a wry face. “I miss it sometimes, but not when I had to put lives on the line. With no real troopers in harm’s way this may almost be fun. Almost.”

O O O

“There you are, sir!” Meyers called, coming around the corner of the Slalom Slope Flume Ride early the next morning.

“Meyers!” Wolfe greeted her. “How’s your bear suit coming?”

“Sir!” the procurement officer exclaimed, shocked. “Sir, we’ve got a problem.”

“A problem!” a squeaky voice declared. It belonged to a long-legged stork, who stalked over to see if he could help.

“A problem,” declaimed a deep-voiced frog. “We have to help!” It hopped alongside, until Daivid and Meyers were surrounded by puppets.

“Do you mind?” he said, batting them away. “Go on, Meyers.”

“Well, sir, it came up when Boland just tried out a maneuver in his … er … disguise.”

“The lion suit,” Daivid said, indulgently. “I thought so.”

“Er, yes, sir. Well, sir, we’re not bulletproof, so while some of the puppets are wearing our blue armor, we’re wearing the hard suits under our costumes?”

“That’s right. Go on.”

“Well, some of the Insurgents have got the same kind of armor we do. We saw it in the video from the Wingle mansion. I mean, it’s an older version, looks more like ancient camouflage than invisibility?”

“I’ve seen it, Meyers. I’ve even worn it. What about it?”

“Well, it may be old armor, but it has the same kind of heads-up infrared displays as our new suits. Sir, they’re going to know that the puppets are not living beings!”

“Awww!” the puppets protested.

“We’re alive,” an owl insisted, “if you believe in us.”

Daivid shushed them again. No, they weren’t. His heart sank. In seconds the enemy would find the scarce real combatants among the hordes of dressed-up mannequins, and ignore all the others. They would concentrate all their firepower on the Cockroaches. The park would fall in minutes. His plan was about to fail before it was launched. He was devastated. “I do see the problem, Meyers. Any infrared sensor isn’t going to be fooled, no matter how realistic the uniforms are. I can’t believe I didn’t think about that. We have got to do something about it, immediately. Any ideas?”