Chapter 7

Ambassador Rik-Rik reported that the Alphans had admitted that we had beat their best efforts and were willing to go along with Rik's proposals, if the Betans would agree. Now, all that we had to do was repeat our success on the Betan blockhouse.

We equipped ourselves for this operation just as we had for the attack on the Alphan blockhouse. As before, we had no idea what we would be facing, so we had to go in pretty much prepared for anything. The only thing we knew for sure was that we would face the best the Betans had to offer.

We were transported to our jump-off point which was similar to what we had faced on the previous job. The Betans had smoothed the field surrounding the blockhouse and put in a bunch of pillboxes equipped with machine guns. I still didn't know why they didn't use stun guns, which would have been much more effective against us.

Anyway, we used our previous tactics against the pill boxes and scored the same results. It appeared that the Betan AI was no better than the Alphan AI. The AI just couldn't cope with a multitude of targets.

The guns on the blockhouse, itself, were doing a better job of shooting at us, so we really needed to eliminate them before we went any further. Despite the fact that we had the laser augmented aiming devices, the very nature of the grenade rounds caused them to drift enough to one side or up and down to make it impossible to score a hit into the loopholes the guns were firing from.

It looked like Julia was going to have to go up on the structure and push some demolition charges into the loopholes by hand. Jim wanted to go with her to act as her mule and he was as good a choice as any, so we sent him along. They made use of their enhanced strength and agility to climb the side of the blockhouse and stuff the charges right down the throats of the machine guns through the loopholes.

Once this was done, we were free to approach the door to the blockhouse. Julia blew it open with one of her medium-sized charges and we started to walk in. This is where we met our first setback. Jim was working point and he must have tripped a booby trap as he walked through the door. There was a tremendous explosion and buckshot in about .45 caliber flew everywhere. One, or more, of the buckshot caught Jim in the head and he was out for the rest of the operation. His helmet was cracked and we had to make an emergency repair while we called for a transporter to evacuate him to a safe place to sleep off the effect of the concussion.

We couldn't see anything through the doorway because the interior of the building was totally without light. Our enhanced vision couldn't find enough light inside the building to compete successfully against the light we were getting from outside—we were blinded by the ambient daylight at our backs. Our UV vision was no good in this kind of situation and our IR vision was overloaded just the same way as was our normal vision. We didn't have enough experience with our other vision ranges, radio and X-ray, to be able to interpret what we saw. I did make a note to increase our training at these frequencies.

We talked about the situation for a few minutes and then Cicero asked, "Why don't we shoot an ordinary flare into the building and see what happens?"

We all slapped our heads and nodded "Of course!" at this. Cicero pulled a flare gun out of his pack and Augusta was elected to fire it off to see what would happen. To our surprise, the flare traveled about 65 feet without hitting a wall or any other barricade. The flare lay on the floor and did a good job of illuminating the interior of the blockhouse.

As nearly as we could tell, the blockhouse was an empty shell with no walls to break up the line of sight anywhere within the building. It was very much like a conventional airplane hanger back on Earth in the mid 20th century. The interior was a large rectangle with only one thing to break up the complete emptiness of the room: there was a squat, conical structure in the middle of the room that was painted a bright yellow. There was our target inviting us to come in and blow it up. Yeah, fat chance!

The basic cone was surrounded by a grid of slats angled in such a way to redirect a missile up enough to be almost parallel to the surface of the cone, so a shaped charge would be too far away to perform properly and a kinetic slug would be deflected too far to get a proper purchase on the cone. The Betans were smarter than we had expected. The obvious form of attack would be to keep firing at the target until we got lucky, but we would probably need hundreds, if not thousands, of rounds to accomplish anything. There had to be a better way!

We couldn't rush the cone because of a multitude of machine guns set up with interlaced fields of fire. We had seen that when the flare had been shot into the room. This had unleashed a rain of bullets, marked by tracers, which seemed to cover the entire volume of the room up to about 25 feet from the floor. We couldn't simply jump over the bullets because the roof was too low.

Stepping out away from the door would surely draw fire, and, even if we wouldn't be killed by the bullets, we would eventually be hit in the head and knocked unconscious. This would accomplish the same thing, as far as the test was concerned.

Again, we discussed the problem. We reached the conclusion that we needed to burn our way through the cone, rather than blow a hole in it. We could readily accomplish this if we could get a large charge of thermite to burn next to the shell. Getting the thermite was no problem, getting the thermite next to the target's shell was the problem!

Justina suggested that we put the thermite into a cylindrical barrel or drum and roll it across the floor so that it came to rest against the target. This sounded like a good idea until we considered how hard we would have to shove the drum to make it roll all the way to the center of the room. It would have to roll pretty fast at first to have enough momentum to make it roll all the way, and that was sure to draw fire from the machine guns. This would ignite the thermite before it was in position and probably burn a hole in the floor that we would have a hell of a time getting around on our next attempt.

Arthur said, "Look, all of our suggestions and ideas so far have been doomed to failure because we had to move the charge fast enough to attract the guns. What if we moved the charge very slowly, so that the AI's attention would not be drawn to the charge and start shooting at it?"

Now, that was different and it might work! We couldn't think of a better idea, so we discussed ways to implement the scheme. Once we were satisfied that we had covered the problems, I went back outside far enough to escape the transporter dampener field and called Rik with a list of things we needed. As usual, thanks to the wonders of the time machine, we received the items we asked for within five minutes, subjective time, of my request.

We carried the items inside the blockhouse door and proceeded to assemble our Rube Goldberg device. We had 25 pounds of thermite on a low wagon; there was a fuse triggered by pulling a long string. We could push the wagon and steer it by a long pole at the rear of the wagon. The pole was jointed every ten feet and we could fasten on new sections of the pole as they were needed.

It was with some trepidation that we pushed the wagon out onto the floor and in range of the firing detectors. It worked! We pushed the wagon very slowly and steered by twisting the pole clockwise or counterclockwise, depending on whether we wanted to go left or right. There was no deadline, so we took 4 hours to push the wagon the 73 feet needed to reach the target.

We pushed the wagon loaded with thermite hard against the target and Julia pulled the string to trigger the fuse. Nothing happened! Damn! What the shit had gone wrong? The thought of pulling the wagon back and setting another fuse was ridiculous! Wait a minute! What would happen if a tracer bullet hit the pile of thermite? The thermite would start burning—that's what would happen!

We had nothing to lose by testing the possibility. Cicero grabbed hold of the push-pole and jerked it back and forth, trying to attract the attention of the AI. Now what? We were being ignored! He pulled and pushed the wagon back and forth several feet, and we were still being ignored. This was getting frustrating!

All right, now was the time to get serious! I was the best shot on the team, so I was elected to fire one of our tracers into the thermite. I carefully lined up the laser spot on the box of thermite and squeezed the trigger. The tracer bullet hit the exact spot where I had aimed, but here was no reaction to the bullet.

I was getting ready to fire another shot when, suddenly, there was a great flash of light on the thermite and the charge let go like some fantastic fireworks display. Apparently, it had taken about 15 seconds for the thermite to burn through to the surface. We were all temporarily blinded by the flash, but the AI was not bothered.

This was enough to get the AI's attention! Now that they were no longer needed, bullets from the surrounding machine guns flew at the burning thermite charge. It was kind of ironic: so many bullets were aimed at the target that we might well not have needed the thermite if we could have triggered this much shooting earlier in the day.