Bill 7 - the Galactic Hero (4 page)

“Aha!” The General pounced, and was reading before the paper had finished coming out of the wall slot. “Your real name is Bill, isn't it?”

“I just said that, didn't I?”

“There's no use denying it. Your DNA doesn't lie. I know who you are. I have your complete service record here, Bill. And a pretty darned impressive record it is, too. 974 citations for drinking on duty. 63 promotions, including a field commission. 62 demotions. Aren't you embarrassed to wear the uniform of the Imperial Space Troopers?”

“Yes, you're right, I am,” Bill sobbed. “Expel me from the corps. I am not worthy.”

“It's not that easy, Trooper. Let's see. You have a fusetender's rating. Your last assignment — I'm impressed. You volunteered for the commandos.”

“I was proud to do it for my Emperor and my General, my General,” Bill fawned. “Yeow!”

“Knock off that voltage!” the General ordered the electroshock technician. “It looks like you're the only survivor of your mission. One survivor — a tremendous success. I'm impressed, which is pretty darned rare. You're the first Trooper in four years who has survived one of Captain Cadaver's missions. That shows initiative. Or luck. Or the fact that you are a Chinger spy.”

He read further down the list, and stopped in shock. “Praise the Lord!” His eyes glowed as he looked at Bill. “God is on our side!” the General enthused. "Working in mysterious ways his wonders to perform. And working only on our side because all Chingers are dirty atheists!

“You, Bill, are the answer to my prayers!”

Bill looked around. He didn't get any electrical shocks, but he didn't get any enlightenment, either. “What prayers? What answer?”

“Untie this man!” Weissearse ordered. “This Trooper is a galactic hero!”

“That's me all right,” Bill said as he was helped to his feet. “Bill, the Galactic Hero. You can look on the cover if you don't believe it.”

“No need to do that,” the General said, "it's all right here in his service record. This man was decorated by the Emperor himself! He wasn't even trained as a gunner, but in great and terrible battle against the Chingers he saved his ship, the great Fanny Hill, mistress of the Imperial fleet. Defeat was imminent, disaster was at hand, the very fate of civilization as we know it hung in the balance, but he shot down the last of the vile Chinger attackers. Without training!

“It can only have been the very hand of God in action!”

Embarrassed by the novelty of kind words Bill scuffed his Swiss Army Foot on the floor. “Maybe, but really — it was just a lucky shot.”

“There is no luck,” Weissearse thundered. "Only the divine and mysterious intervention of the Lord Himself can possibly have been responsible for this! Bill, here, must be one of those protected by God's divine love? And he has been sent to us for a purpose!

“Get him some pants.”

Half an hour later Bill found himself in a fresh uniform, sipping fresh water and trying to pretend it was vodka, and listening to General Weissearse and trying to pretend that the General made any kind of sense at all.

“Do you have any questions, Trooper Bill?”

“Questions?” Bill frowned with unaccustomed thought. “Once maybe. This ship looked just like a space spider when I bumped into that. I never saw a ship like that before. Was that a dream?”

The General chuckled benevolently. “No, Bill. I had this scout ship designed to look like a space spider, so it would be harder for the enemy to find us.”

“But there are no such things as space spiders,” Bill protested.

“Precisely,” the General explained. "So there is nothing designed to detect them, and we are perfectly safe. The Lord helps those who help themselves, after all.

“And it is important that this ship be safe, now that I have been entrusted with this great mission. Now we will be even safer, with you, God's own tail-gunner, protecting us and watching over us. Our vile and insidious foe will never penetrate our defenses with you, Bill, God's chosen vessel, in our crew.”

Bill was certainly flattered to be considered God's chosen vessel and all that, but he wasn't too sure what god this screwball General Weissearse meant. It probably wasn't his own god, Ahura-Mazda — Bill had been raised as a strict Reformed Zoroastrian — and it may not have been the official god of the official Imperial Religion, which was of course the Emperor himself, but that still left a lot of possibilities. In an empire as big as the Empire, there were a lot of religions and nut-cults operating alongside the official one.

Besides the Reformed Zoroastrians, there were the Revived and Amplified Mithraists and the Acoustic Mithraists, the Sunnis and the Moonies, the Buddhists and the Twiggists and the Leafists, worshipers of the Sun and Tau Ceti and Aldebaran and NGC4681, Confusionists, Taoists and Jonesists, Voodoos and Hindus, Elvists and Lennonists and Marxists (with a different sect for each of the brothers except Zeppo and Karl, who shared one), and enough other groups that the nondenominational chapels on a large ship were kept going around the clock with services.

So there was no way of telling what god General Weissearse knew was on his side, and Bill figured it didn't matter all that much, but he would like to know which one had chosen him. If he was going to offer up a prayer, it would be nice to know the proper address. On the other hand, the General might just be screwball and talking through his hat.

Bill hated to do it, but he had to find out more. He forced himself to take another sip of the — gack! — water, and asked, “That's all very flattering, sir, but what the bowb are you talking about?”

The General stood up and started pacing. “I like your face, Bill, if not your manner of speech. You have maybe gotten into some trouble with drinking before, boyish kind of prank. But that won't happen on this ship.” Bill nodded his agreement reluctantly, unseen by the general who ignored him, getting his jollies instead from inside inspiration.

"I trust you. The Lord tells me to trust you, so I do. We have a good relationship, the Lord and I.

“But that's not what I want to talk to you about now. We have been honored with a very special mission. You and I — well, mainly I, with some help from God and you — will strike a blow that will preserve truth, justice and the Imperial way of life. To us the great privilege has fallen, and to us the glory of victory will come.”

Bill was too old a Trooper to be taken in by the inspiration bowb. “This mission, sir, it doesn't by any chance involve people shooting at us? I've had some bad experiences with that...”

“Not at all,” Weissearse heartily reassured Bill. “This will be a simple surgical strike, with very little resistance. The enemy is wily and dangerous, but we will destroy all their guns in the first wave, so we will be perfectly safe. There is nothing to worry about. Nothing can go wrong. Trust me.”

As General Weissearse described this wonderful mission, on which Bill would become a hero at absolutely no risk to himself, Bill became possessed of the feeling that not only wasn't this kosher but that there was a very big pig in the poke. He was sure that the eye-rollingly religious General was full of bowb. There was nothing he could put his finger on — or wanted to — but the more certain Weissearse got, the more doubts Bill had.

At first look it appeared to be as straightforward a piece of stupid military-political action as the Troopers ever got sent into. The enemy was the government of Eyerack, a planet in rebellion against the Emperor. General Weissearse was very clear that neither he nor the Emperor nor anyone else in the entire military establishment had anything against the people of Eyerack. It was only the government, and even then only a very small group of the top leaders of the government, who would be bombed into submission. Of course, it was inevitable that some small number of those who had taken up arms against their loving Emperor might be accidentally blown to smithereens, but in modern total warfare a small number of casualties — say, five or ten — could not be helped.

Had this been an ordinary planet in rebellion, the normal practice would have been to blow it up. Careful studies had been done at the Runt Corporation, the Emperor's favorite think tank, about the different possible ways of removing the cancer of rebellion from the body politic. Blockade was no good; it took a long time, there were no dramatic opportunities for press conferences and briefings in front of colorful maps, and pictures of the action wouldn't even make the back pages of the newscomix without an order from the Imperial Office of Freedom of the Press. Negotiation was even worse; it had all the faults of blockade, plus it showed weakness, since only weaklings talked first and shot later. Sometimes the Fleet would negotiate after a battle, but only if they could find a few prisoners, something that happened quite rarely. Only blowing up a rebellious planet provided a quick and guaranteed solution, as well as pictures that deserved front-page coverage. It was right there in the officers' manual — “If a planet rebels against the Emperor, blow it up.”

But Eyerack was different. Eyerack had something that no other planet in the galaxy had. Eyerack had a neutron mine.

Neutrons, as everyone knows, are very, very small. They are so small, in fact, that you could walk right past one on the street and never see it. And they aren't very sociable, so you don't often find more than a hundred or so together. But you need a great many neutrons to make a neutron bomb.

Of all the weapons humanity had ever invented, the absolute favorite of all the Generals and admirals and field marshals was the neutron bomb. It blew up real good, made a pretty picture that kept the Emperor happy, killed all the enemy soldiers (and sometimes some friendly ones, although that was a minor point), and left all the hardware unharmed.

What could be better?

So Eyerack was very important. Without the Eyerackian neutron mines, there could be no more neutron bombs. And if Eyerack was blown up, it would be very hard to find the mines. They might even be lost forever.

But for the time being the Empire couldn't have any neutrons anyway, because of this rebellion thing.

Somehow, someone had made a terrible mistake. The entire Office of Neutron Procurement had been drafted, court-martialed, and shot for not paying enough attention. While they had been napping, Eyerack had held free elections.

This, by itself, would have been enough to cause a crisis throughout the halls of power. Free elections had been banned centuries ago, under the Edict for the Preservation of Freedom and Democracy. But it was even worse than that.

If free elections were not bad enough, the Eyerackians had overwhelmingly voted for peace.

The only use for neutrons was in making neutron bombs — for killing people.

No more neutron exports! was the cry of the peace party. No more war!

For the empire, there was only one possible response.

A nice, clean, quick, precise, deadly attack. A surgical strike, cutting out the bad and leaving the good. With maybe every one on the other side killed so there would be no worry about any future problems. The Empire needed those neutron mines back but quick, and in working order so the Chinger War could be continued and expanded. So what it needed at once if not sooner, was ruthless dedication and an officer who would stop at nothing. Other than peace. It called for General Weissearse. Now General Weissearse was calling for Bill.

“Yes, Bill, the Lord hath provideth thee in my hour of need! And with thy divinely guided hand on my tail gun, we cannot faileth!”

Bill gave up on trying to explain to the General that he didn't know how to operate a tail gun. Why bother? What he really needed was to keep his ass covered and find whoever on this ship was running the illicit still. Someone always was. And the tail gunner's turret would be an ideal place to hide a few bottles; no one in his right mind would go there if he didn't have to.

He groveled his way out of the General's cabin. Bill wasn't sure that the General even noticed; he was busy in some kind of religious-military ecstasy.

Since the General's ship, the Heavenly Peace, wasn't a normal flagship, but a scout, it didn't have the normal accouterments of combat command. The General's cabin took up less than a full deck, for example, and didn't even have the standard private gym; the General had to use the same one as the other officers, and share the steam bath and masseuse. The ship was so small that there was only one dining hall, for the officers, and one mess hall for the enlisted men which was really the engine room with tables over the pipes. It got so hot that most Troopers couldn't eat; which was OK since the food was inedible in the first place. The chef in the dining hall would have access to the wine cellar, of course, so he wouldn't bother with a still. Bill went to visit the mess-hall cook.

He steered his way through the rows of dented metal tables and pipes. The tables had carefully been arranged in a pattern about halfway between zigzag and random, so the troopers had to keep their eyes down and their wits about them in order to get across the room without slicing up their knees and ankles. Fortunately, the place was empty — breakfast was just over, and most of the crew was on line at sick call — so he could walk on the tables for some of the more complicated parts.

“Closed. Bowb off,” the cook growled.

“And a good morning to you as well,” Bill placated. “Would there be a cup of something dark and hot for a new member of the crew?”

The cook grabbed a cup and dipped it into the sink where a KP robot was washing pots. “Here.”

Bill swallowed hard, then took a sip of the liquid. “Yummies!” he lied. “That's much better than the pseudo-coffee at Camp Buboe!” He drained the cup, grinned, and held it out to the cook. “Please, sir, may I have some more?”

The cook frowned and glared and grumbled, but he took the cup and dipped it again. This time he tasted it himself.

“You know, you're right. This is better than the usual stuff. And cheaper, too. With the money I save, maybe I'll be able to buy Mom that wooden leg.”

“Aww.” Bill had once had a Mom too, and maybe even still did. The mail didn't get through too regularly, so he couldn't be sure. “Your mom lost a leg? That's too bad. I could recommend a place that's real good for feet, though.” He hoisted the Swiss Army Foot up onto the counter.