Keith Laumer - Zone Yellow

“Can’t have the people upstairs getting the idea there’s a war on,” I agreed. The shot was fired, and the car was enveloped in a raging ball of dust, which blew away to reveal the vehicle, apparently unharmed.

“You see our problem, Colonel,” Richtofen said. “It appears they’ve responded to our high explosives and projectiles by developing a variation of the disruptor principle to contain and absorb explosions. Incredibly fast work! We’re facing a formidable foe, make no mistake, Colonel!”

This was getting serious. He’d called me “Colonel” twice in one breath. He called me by my rank only when things were really sticky.

“Suppose I sneak up and let the air out of their tires,” I suggested in a mock-conspiratorial tone, but Manfred was in no mood for my sense of humor. Neither was I. Of course, I had already reported the tank-traveler I’d briefly captured; we were surprised we hadn’t seen more. There were only the foot soldiers, but there were a lot of them. Someone had said three million: Intelligence had upped its estimate to four million, in Stockholm and elsewhere, give or take a few hundred thousand, with more arriving every second.

“We’re losing ground fast.” Manfred smacked his palm with his fist. “We need to do something, dammit!” Actually, he said “devil” or its Swedish equivalent, which is as close as the Swedish language can come to swearing. He seldom spoke German; he’d been here ever since his forced landing in 1917. He gave me an angry look and said, “No, Brion; I can see no alternative at the moment. But surely a large unit capable of carrying a ten-man strike team would be best.”

“Sorry to disagree, sir,” I said. “I don’t want to go out in a blaze of glory attempting the impossible: challenging a nation with a handful of suicide-squaders. I want to slip in with no fanfare and do what needs to be done. According to this Swft, they’re in desperate condition already. What I have in mind―”

“Very well,” Richtofen cut me off. “As you wish, but I’m doubtful― very doubtful―that your approach will succeed. Instead, I fear I’ll simply lose my best officer.”

“Plus a couple of other fellows,” I said.

I sent Helm off to requisition some issue rations, and get back ten minutes ago.

He took off at a run, and I got back down to business. There was no time to waste. Dr. Smovia had gone off to talk to our medical people.

“Manfred, if I don’t make it, I know you’ll see to it that Barbro is well taken care of.” He nodded gruffly, and on that note we went to the Net garages.

The former car barn near Stallmastareg&rden still looked like a car barn; even the streetcar tracks were still in place, used for moving cargo carts. The original old-fashioned gold and blue streetcars had been shipped to Lima, Peru, years ago. I hoped they were well taken care of. There was a neat brick walk beside a trimmed hedge leading to the personnel door under a row of linden trees. We went back.

It was a big, echoey space, with little office-cubicles along one side, and half a dozen shuttles of various shapes and sizes parked across the orange-painted floor with a ruled three-foot grid of white lines, helpful in pinpointing positions of the vehicles when it was necessary to shift into tight quarters at the destination.

We stood for a moment just inside the personnel entry, and looked at the technical people swarming over, under, and around the travelers, some with a plain packing-crate look, others disguised as heavy trucks or buses, two or three gotten up in heavy war-hulls that looked like what they were: our latest Mark XX all-terrain tanks, with enough armament to blast their way out of any situation.

“A Mark III, I think,” Manfred said as if suggesting it.

I shook my head, though he wasn’t looking at me. “My idea, sir,” I said, trying not to sound dogged, “is to sneak in there unnoticed and work quietly.”

He nodded. “As you wish, Brion. Personally, I don’t think anything you, a single man, can do will bring to heel a nation of invaders whose own world is in a state of chaos, judging from your report.”

“Maybe it won’t work,” it was my turn to concede, “but maybe it will. Raw force won’t. And I won’t be quite alone; Lieutenant Helm and Doctor Smovia will be with me.”

Sjolund and a bunch of technicians were in a huddle around an innocuous-looking lift-van, a wooden crate stout enough to be hoisted, fully loaded, aboard ship without collapsing. I went over. A young fellow named Rolf saw us first and came to attention.

“Zone Yellow, eh, sir?” he queried, but not as though he didn’t know the answer. I looked inside the van. It would be cramped for three, but it would do.

“They volunteered?” Manfred inquired punctiliously. I nodded. I hadn’t given them much of a chance not to, but if they didn’t want to go, all they had to do was get accidently delayed in their errands. Helm was as gung ho as they came; I wasn’t worried about that. As for Smovia, he was so wrapped up in the medical ramifications, he wouldn’t notice where he was.

I spent a few minutes warming up the M-C drive, and running through a routine pre-trip; everything was in the green. It had been a while, so I tried a little experimenting, just to get the feel of the controls again, shifting a few A-lines, within the B-l-one parameters, of course, avoiding the Blight, though I did dip in long enough to fix a view on the screen of a line that was as bad as any I’d ever looked at on my previous fast trips across the Blight. It was horrible. The trick was to come close enough to the blighted A-line to see detail without dropping into identity with it, a fate too dismal to contemplate.

Helm arrived with his supplies, breathing hard: he’d had a run-in with a squad of Ylokk. We stowed the stuff aft; when we came back out to the front compartment, he recoiled at what he saw on the screen: a vast green and yellow jungle overgrowing the ruins of buildings, with immense worms that were actually free-living human intestines writhing over the matted foliage.

“What’s that?” he blurted.

I spent a few minutes trying to explain it to him, actually stalling, waiting for Smovia to come back. Manfred was at the door of the van, watching for his arrival―he’d sent a man to find him and hurry him up. He looked at the big wall clock at one-minute intervals. Finally Smovia arrived at a dead run. “See here, Colonel…”he started.

Just then there was a detonation from the direction of the main cargo doors, one of which slammed into view, crumpled like scrap paper. A crowd of Ylokk were right behind it. Shots were fired, and rats fell, kicking. I grabbed Smovia’s arm and urged him into the disguised shuttle, then picked off an eager rat who was too close to ignore. Then, after Helm got back in, I stepped into the cramped compartment and clamped the hatch behind me. Somebody was pounding on the hull. We had to go—

Helm had gone back to watching the horrors on the screen: a vast heap of pale-veined flesh now, with human limbs and heads growing from it like warts. He wanted to know how such monstrosities could be.

I tried to explain. Like most Swedes, and most other people as well, he had heard only vague rumors of the Imperium and the vast skein of alternate-probability worlds over which the Net Monitor Service maintained an ongoing surveillance, not interfering with the unfolding of events except in case of imminent threat to the Imperium itself, or to the integrity of the whole manifold. We weren’t alone in this endeavor; a humanoid species called the Xonijeel maintained their own Interdimensional Monitor Service, attempting, like us, to prevent any further catastrophe such as the one that had precipitated the area of runaway entropy, the swatch of ruined A-lines surrounding the Zero-zero line―a disaster Xonijeel had avoided more by luck than any particular countermeasures. Agent Dzok of Xonijeel called our Zero-zero line B-l-one, and by avoiding the Blight, they had missed us for a century.