And recorded the frequency bands of Wyzhnyny radio traffic.
The humans, on the other hand, had no duties except to watch the sensor display and the planet itself. It was an invitation to drowse, so an alarm had been provided. The watch wore a communications earpiece, and when anything broke the slow and regular unfolding of the sensor pickups, an alarm ruptured any doze or inattention.
To ease the monotony, Alfhild Olavsdottir recited, in a quiet voice, extensively from the Icelandic sogur-the sagas. More than any other Europeans, even the Finns, the Icelanders had retained their old language as the primary domestic, social, and cultural idiom. Terran was their language of science, business, and the world at large. As for daydreaming-Olavsdottir could be an enthusiastic, even a formidable lover, but she seldom fantasized sex. Except occasionally to compose erotic poetry about some lover in her past. But she did not do that here.
On his watches, Stoorvol's thoughts included women, Alfhild Olavsdottir for one. She was a lot older than he-ten or so years-but interesting. According to the skipper, she was a Ph.D. planetologist with a bachelor's in invertebrate zoology. The academic degrees had made her eligible for this mission, but no more eligible than many others. What had made the difference, Weygand said, was her temperament, and her record as a field leader. "Those, and being smart as they get."
Smart, Stoorvol thought, meant different things to different people. But she'd made a good impression on him when they'd boarded the scout and she'd seen him stash his rucker in a locker. "Why the rucksack?" she'd asked. He'd always resented gratuitous requests to explain himself, certainly from people he didn't know well. So he'd simply said it held things he might need, and with a nod she'd let it go at that.
Besides thinking about women, he revisited old conflicts-fierce rivalries as a kid growing up; fistfights at boot camp and on pass; and later, one at the Academy, where fights were seriously frowned on. He'd almost always won, but the last had nearly gotten him expelled. He'd been young then, he told himself. He looked at things differently from the vantage of twenty-eight years.
And he thought about the collection missions-the collection of hornets and the collection of prisoners. (He was to protect the first mission and lead the second.) If everything went according to drill… Things seldom did, of course. It wasn't wise to rely on scripts. They were fine as a starting place, and even as a guide, but they weren't likely to survive a complete mission. Major Asahara had stressed that in Military Planning 202. Because others, notably the enemy, had their own scripts, and typically the physical universe added serious unforeseens. Things happened, and necessity often demanded snap decisions, with different people commonly responding differently. And in case his cadets didn't believe him, Asahara, as game master in their electronic war game labs, would throw in unforeseeables that required unexpected and often drastic improvisations: new tactics, new strategies, even new objectives.
Stoorvol could still quote the major, or nearly enough to make no difference: "Say you have a battle plan that will win this major battle for you. And a seriously chancy departure from it that, if successful, could win the war; but, if unsuccessful, would be a disaster. Discuss the factors in choosing, and create examples."
For days the class had gone round and round on that. It had been the most valuable discussion they'd had. And among the factors had been alien mentalities. Because if they ever fought a war-a real war, a serious war-it would be against alien invaders. None of them doubted it. It was the truism behind every plan War House made, everything it did. It had been for centuries.
In Stoorvol's ruminations, any verbalization was silent and in Terran. As with most Terrans, Terran was his only language. Olavsdottir had commented that his surname looked Norwegian with an Americanized spelling, probably from the late 19th or early 20th century. That had been news to him. The Americas had been Terra's great ethnic melting pot; the rest of the world was only now catching up. He'd never wondered about his ancestry, which besides various European roots, included Dakotah, Ibo, Samoan and Kachin.
Hour by hour, the Wyzhnyny settlement site crept across the face of Tagus, toward the terminator near the east limb of the visible hemisphere. Before the continent disappeared, a larger edged into sight. On the same watch, a settlement appeared on the new continent, and later a third, both marked by electronic activity. One was at a northern latitude, in what appeared to be a steppe. The other was in a large basin between two high, subtropical mountain ranges. Neither was at all like the tropical rainforest Morgan had described.
"So," Stoorvol said, "now the question is whether there's a fourth one down there somewhere."
Some hours later they were satisfied there wasn't. The first one was the right one. Meanwhile they'd learned the number of surveillance buoys parked off the planet-four of them, located to provide coverage of the colonized continents.
Their next task was to scout Tagus's surface. Stoorvol was about to generate warpdrive when they learned there were indeed Wyzhnyny warships in the system. Their sensors picked up one of them a scant few hundred miles from where they watched in SRS 12/1. It was departing Tagus's single moon, and crossing to the planet in gravdrive. Why the Wyzhnyny had been on the moon, or very near it, and whether others still lurked there, neither Terran knew.
So instead of generating warpspace and crossing invisibly to Tagus, Stoorvol backed away in gravdrive, then returned to the Bering with a short warp jump, to let the captain know about the Wyzhnyny ship.
Captain Weygand promptly sent another two-man team out in SRS 12/2, to watch from the limb.
After listening to Stoorvol and Olavsdottir, he decided to skip the surface scouting. With four Wyzhnyny surveillance buoys, and possibly a space force on the moon's nearside, they might very well get only one chance before having to flee the system. So the first crossing would be for hornet collection-much the most feasible and least dangerous of their two missions.
The logic was inescapable, but it left Stoorvol ill at ease. In his heart of hearts, the most dangerous foray held priority, and at any rate, live Wyzhnyny prisoners seemed more valuable than hornets to the war effort.
Some hours later, the hornet collection team boarded the 46-foot collection boat, the Mei-Li, sometimes termed "the nursing whale" because she was carried outboard. The hornet collection team consisted of Alfhild Olavsdottir and two entomology techs, plus both squads of marine commandos for ground security. Paul Stoorvol would pilot the crossing, with PO1 Achmed Menges as copilot. Two weapons techs rode in the Mei-Li's gun bubbles.
Slipping the magnetic tie that held the Mei-Li to the gangway lock, Stoorvol separated from the Bering. At 200 feet from the surface, he activated the strange-space generator for warpdrive. Then departed the vicinity of the Bering much faster than he would have in gravdrive, though not remotely approaching full warpspeed. Not this close to planetary bodies. Invisible from F-space, they quickly cleared the limb, and saw Tagus again on their screens. Not as a blue and white sphere against deep, star-strewn black, but a computer artifact-a featureless silver globe against utterly starless indigo blue. Shipsmind could mock up something very similar to the planet's F-space appearance, even dubbing in star images. But the Admiralty specified silver on indigo for simulations in warpspace, to remind the watch it wasn't real.