Barry Longyear - Enemy Papers

"What?"

"They’re coming." The figure pointed toward the lander.

"I see them."

The figure squatted until Joanne Nicole could see its face. Sergeant Zina Lottner; code clerk.

"We finished the search. There’s nothing down there the Draggers can use." She held out a silver card. There was dried blood on her fingers.

"I found this in your quarters."

Joanne Nicole took the invitation from the sergeant. The lovely little card sparkled. Amidst the mud, filth, and blood, the card looked obscenely clean, bright, happy. She opened the card and read the raised lettering inside.

The Officers and Ranks of

HEADQUARTERS COMPANY

181 ST FORCE DIVISION, III CORPS,

PLANET CATVISHNU GARRISON, USEF

Cordially Invite

MAJ. JOANNE NICOLE

to the

Sixteenth Annual Celebration

of the

Noraanka Dima

to be held at

1930 HOURS, 21 FEBRUARY 2072

(2651 HRS. 9/9 LOCAL TIME)

in the

MAIN AUDITORIUM

STORM MOUNTAIN

She closed the card. "Lottner, why did you bring me this?"

"I don’t know. I thought you might want…" Lottner stood, facing the approaching Drac lander. "I saw what was left of your gown. It must have been beautiful."

Joanne Nicole dropped the card into the mud and stepped on it with her boot. Lottner stood silently for a moment, then turned and splashed slowly down the muddy slope.

It had been a beautiful gown; a silly little puff of silver and white.

"How long have soldiers been sitting in mud?"

She turned toward the sound of the rough voice and saw a man sitting cross-legged in the reddish-brown soup. Morio Taiseido, lieutenant, former code officer, present mud soldier, future POW. His companion, infantry sergeant Amos Benbo, kept an enigmatic stare fixed upon the approaching enemy ship.

Hardly moving his lips, the sergeant answered: "How long have there been soldiers?"

The ancient infantry joke seemed oddly profound at that moment. Joanne Nicole looked at her knees, lifted her hand, and scraped some mud from them. She cupped her hand and studied the contents.

Mud. It had the color of blood mixed with excrement.

Mud. It smelled like blood mixed with excrement.

Mud. The universal military cosmetic.

When she raised her head, the Drac ship had grown larger. Does the Drac infantry, the Tsien Denvedah. sit in the mud? Do the Dracs bleed, gripe, or do anything that other soldiers do? Two hours into the battle, Intelligence Chief Colonel Nkruma hadn’t thought so.

Nkruma.

She closed her eyes, sending her memory deep into the broken mountain behind her; back to so few hours ago.

Nkruma’s round, usually impassive face was twisted as though he were in physical pain. And he was. The gleam of sweat upon his dark skin and the shaken voice telegraphed the words no intelligence officer ever wanted to hear.

"Nicole, we must code twenty the command."

Code twenty: destroy all classified documents and pieces of military equipment. Two hours into the battle and the garrison was throwing in the towel-preparing for total defeat.

Two lousy hours into the battle.

She was still wearing her gown. It was indecent. Considering the number of lives, the amount of time, the amount of money and effort invested, it seemed to be against some higher law for all of that to be written off two hours into the fight.

A major battle-the subjugation of an entire planet-should take more time.

More time.

Nkruma had looked down at his hands. two brown-black knots upon the chaos of papers covering his desk.

"I have already told General Katsuzo. He… he told me that I was lying!"

Nicole had reached out her hand and placed it upon Nkruma’s shoulder. "I’ll take care of the code twenty. Colonel."

Nkruma clasped his hands, closed his eyes, and spoke in a deathly quiet voice.

"What do the Dracs have up there? What in the hell do they have up there?"

She gently shook his shoulder. "I’ve sent the performance reports off to sector intelligence. We might catch it, but sector will come up with new tactics. The next time the Dracs hit a base-"

Nkruma shrugged her hand away and looked up at her with terror-filled eyes; he spoke with a voice choked with shame-humiliation.

"They’re sweeping the entire defense command aside as though… as though we are nothing!"

He lowered his head until his forehead rested upon his clasped hands. "Nothing!" His head rocked back-and-forth upon his hands.

"Do they read minds? Do the bloody yellow devils read minds?"

Nicole had left the office, issued the orders, then returned to her own section to begin erasing the records. Captain Ted Makai, tactical officer for the Storm Mountain complex, still in his formal whites, sat in the intelligence center, a glass of champagne in his hand. He raised his head as she entered.

"Happy days, Joanne."

"How much have you had to drink?"

"Not nearly enough."

"Aren’t you needed someplace? There’s a bit of a war going on outside."

"That explains the noise." He inhaled sharply. "No, I’m not needed anymore. All the damage I can do is already done. It’s up to the computers, now." She walked around him and began setting up the sequence to dump the memory cores. "Joanne, a century ago this would have been called a complete rout." He finished his champagne in one gulp and let his glass fall to the floor. "But there just isn’t any place to rout to."

"I’d love to sit and hold your hand, Ted, but I’m busy."

"Busy, busy, busy."

Makai stood, put his hands into his pockets, and began singing "Johnny Zero" as he walked through the door into the corridor:

The deep whine of an enemy assault craft…

Joanne Nicole opened her eyes and looked again at the approaching Drac lander. Erasing the records had been such,a waste of time. When the Dracs attacked the Storm Mountain command complex, the memory cores had been destroyed.

Everything had been destroyed.

Almost everyone had been destroyed.

She never did see Ted Makai again.

By unspoken agreement, the survivors decided to meet the Dracs above ground, and had joined the mud soldiers on the surface. Code clerks, cooks, boot-polishers, technicians, programmers, operators, staff officers, and paper wizards moved into the sarcasm of a front line the infantry was trying to establish.

At first there were fewer weapons than there were hands to fire and serve them. In an hour the numbers bad balanced. In another hour they had five times as many weapons as they needed. The line never was established.

Now that the Dracs had withdrawn, there was nothing left but the bodies, the mud, and forty-odd sets of eyes staring blankly at the approach of the enemy ship.

Eyes.

Nicole recognized those eyes from the faces of hundreds of thousands of defeated soldiers-in intelligence training, pictures of forgotten soldiers in forgotten places: Andersonville, the Ardennes, Spain, Stalingrad, Bataan, Okinawa, Bastogne, Korea, Vietnam, the Sinai, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Acadia, Capetown, Planet Dacha, Planet Baalphor, Chadduk Station…