CHIP HAD TO HOLD Ginny and steer. Words just seemed pitifully inadequate.
And then they rounded the corner. The floor was solid wall-to-wall Maggots and there was no way to slow down or stop. Chip knew that hitting two or three hundred slowshields at that speed was going to be like driving into a thirty-foot thick concrete wall.
Only . . . it wasn't.
"Brace yourselves!" He shouted. They hit the Maggots. And kept plowing through. Crunch and splatter. Ginny was knocking them back with a shovel. The Maggots weren't slowshielded. And they weren't warrior types either. They were mostly small, weird-shaped specialists drafted into line as a solid cork.
Eventually, though, the tractor was brought to a stop by the sheer weight of crushed bodies. Chip grabbed the chainsaw from where it hung, ripped the pull cord and thrust it at Ginny. "Take this! Gimme that." He snatched the shovel from her and belted at a pick-snouted Maggot. Beside him he heard the chainsaw ripping and growling.
A glance showed him Fluff belaboring a Maggot with a piece of pipe. "AIEEE! GET DOWN, YOU FILTHY BEAST!" Either pipe or galago-volume was enough.
Pistol, clinging to the air filter, was flailing at the mass with a length of chain. All he needed was a biker jacket. Beside him Fal fought tooth and claw, until Nym, from the trailer, tossed him a piece of reinforcing rod. Up on the trailer, all with bits of reinforcing rod, Nym, Doll, Melene and Doc were smashing Maggots away. These Maggots weren't fighters. Just endless.
The bats, except O'Niel, had dived to war. O'Niel sat calmly on the middle of the trailer, took a drink from a bottle, then popped a wick into it. Then he held it upside down to soak, while flicking the lighter with his feet. Then, using both wings he tossed it. "Duck, you suckers!" Fire still caused pandemonium.
O'Niel shouted to Fluff, a lid in his mouth making him sound even more bog-Irish. "Ghet oop here and ohpen bhattles, damn ye!" With a leap, the galago complied.
The Magh' could still overwhelm them, but only by sheer panic and numbers and the slipperiness of the ground. Nym came up with a new crowd-clearer. Some of the scrap brought for shrapnel in the expedient mines yielded a couple of huge nuts, which the big rat hastily strung onto ten feet of nylon, bitten from the roll. He scrambled forward over Chip's head and onto the front edge of the radiator grill, where he clung by toes and tail. He whirled it around his head. He nearly got Pistol on the first arc, but then he got the angle right. The Maggots were mostly small and Nym kept the thing whirling at the height of the waving limbs. Knocking limbs off didn't even slow the weapon down.
One of the whirling nuts howled, and that put the horn into Chip's mind. He dropped the shovel and set the tractor going again, leaning on the horn. It brayed and brayed, as they began to slither and crunch their way forward through a flaming fleeing mob. The tank pump chose this moment to add its own drowning-baby shriek. Something about that seemed to frighten the Maggots even more.
And then . . .
They were through. Out on the far side. Rolling along the open Maggot-way. Nym dropped his makeshift flail and began cheerfully tossing insecticide bombs behind them.
"We did it! We did it!" shouted Siobhan. "Holy mother! I think we just beat more Maggots than the whole army ever has in any one battle!"
"No shields," murmured Chip, wonderingly. "Imagine going to fight with no shields."
"I haven't got a shield," said Ginny. "It didn't stop me."
It stopped everybody else on the tractor.
They stared at her openmouthed—except for Fluff, who jumped up on Virginia's shoulder and put his long fluffy tail around her throat. "It is true! And I do not have one of these either. Bah, a true knight does not cower behind a shield!" He adopted a Napoleonic stance on her shoulder.
Chip shook his head. "You're a loony. In fact, you are a pair of flipping loonies. It didn't occur to me that you didn't have shields. Everybody in the army has shields! I . . . forgot you were civs."
"I'm not sure if that's a compliment, or an insult," Ginny said dryly.
"Au contraire! It is a revelation." Doc leapt up on the engine cowling. His ratty beady eyes glowed with an inner fire. "You have shifted the entire paradigm of war."
"Oh, put a sock in . . ." Pistol began.
Doc turned on Pistol. "You shut up! And listen for once, you fool."
The astonished Pistol shut up. And everyone listened.
"Our thinking tends to operate within the bounds of a set of preconceived premises. Every now and again those premises are shown to be flawed, and then the entire structure built on them must be rebuilt." The philosopher-rat cleared his throat and then continued with the dignity of a rat addressing the prestigious Shareholder's Society for the Advancement of Science.
"The humans entered this war with one of the basic premises wrong. Their species has, for a long time now, fought with projectile, long-range weapons. They assumed that that was the way any civilized species would fight, if given the choice. They assumed that if their troops were unshielded the Maggots would use projectile fire. It was an incorrect premise. The Maggots bodies are their weapons."
"We still can't use guns while they have shields," said Chip.
The rat shrugged. "You are still thinking within the terms of reference of the projectile weapons premise. The point is: while Maggots use shields they can't use guns either. The strength of human armies wasn't always projectile weapons. It was that they were armies relying on numbers, not on individual strengths. Believe me: Shields and the small AP mines our bats sowed helped the Maggots, not ourselves. They isolated individual humans. They made you do what your history shows that very few of you can do well: They made you fight on your own, instead of in mass attacks. We are better off without shields and AP mines. A mass of shielded Maggots couldn't penetrate a solid wall of humans with pole-mines . . . if the humans stood shoulder to shoulder, unshielded, without interpenetration of the human and Maggot shields. There is no good reason why an unshielded human is worse off than a shielded one, in a fight with a shielded Magh'. For one thing you can run away faster."
Chip saw the truth of it, clearly. But he had a feeling—a certainty, actually—that some desk jockey back at high command wouldn't see it that way.
"He's a broth of foine thinker, that," said O'Niel. "Whould you be hafter a small drink to be whashing down all of that dry preaching, Doc, or Georg Hegel, as you style yourself?"
Doc took off the pince-nez. "Not any more, I do not. I see now that that too was a false premise, rooted in the past. Henceforth I will call myself . . . Pararattus. I will build a new philosophy . . ."
Pistol snorted. "I reckon I'll still call you Doc. For all that, methinks, you may have something . . ."
"Yes," said Bronstein. "I hadn't thought about the projectile weapons . . ."
"But the Magh' do use projectile weapons! Have you forgotten their artillery?" demanded the Korozhet from his bag. "You are wrong, rat!"
Doc regarded the spiny mass of alien. Then he shook his head. "No. I'm not wrong."
For a moment the only noise was the tractor's thud-thudding diesel.
"What we need is an on-off switch for slowshields, Professor," said Ginny.
"Like I wish we had for Pricklepuss," muttered Chip.
Eamon and Siobhan came back from scouting. "Next left."
Siobhan settled on Chip's shoulder. "You should look after Chip better, Virginia. 'Tis troubled he looks. Give him some chicken soup."
Siobhan was, however, more concerned about the rest of her flock. "Why is everyone so quiet and troubled looking? To be sure it is to certain death we're going . . ."
Chip made a wry face. "Doc just told the Crotchet he was wrong."
The bat nearly fell off Chip's shoulder. "That's surely not true?"
Chip saw the corner. Dropped a gear, and took it in what—for him—was consummate skill. "Surely is. And I agree with him."
By now the gap outside the walls was a tight, narrow spiral. Chip started to turn back in toward the heart of the spiral—his own heart reaching for open moonlight-bathed heights. It felt like hours that they'd been traveling and fighting their way underground. It should be morning by now, surely?
"The other way," Bronstein commanded.
"But that's out!" Chip protested.
Bronstein shook her head at him. "Stop thinking like a Maggot. Never try the same trick twice. Tell him, Ginny."
"She's right, Chip. The group-mind will know."
Chip put his foot on the clutch. "Right! Now I feel like Doc. Breakthrough. All we've got do is keep changing the pattern! Come on, Ginny. Turn that tap on and let's fog this whole passage with alcohol."
Even in the dashboard light he could see she'd turned pale. He didn't pretend not to understand. "It wasn't your fault, Ginny," he said softly. "And it will keep us alive, if we play it right. The expedient mines will trigger it."
The rats were already busy setting them. Each hinged plank had a tenpenny nail which would strike a cartridge percussion cap as soon as a Maggot stood on one. The cartridge was buried in a pile of diesel-wet fertilizer and covered in "useful" metal junk from the workshop.
As soon as the rats were back up on the tractor, Ginny filled the back-tunnel with atomized alcohol. If it affected the Maggots the same way it did humans, they'd be too drunk to ever reach the expedient mines. Then Chip drove out, away from the heart of the spiral, before breaking in again.
There were already Maggot sentries on the entryway to the main passage. The group-mind was learning. But there were only two of them, unshielded. Not warriors. Child's play to this group. But now the tractor's position was known to the group-mind. What it didn't know was the convolutions of Bronstein's mind.
"Straight across," she ordered. "And rats, set some trip wires further up the main passage. Quickly! Chip, you keep her running down this passage, slowly. We'll catch up."
"You do your thing, Bronstein. And tell Eamon not to nip back and watch the big bang," said Chip.
"Methinks it must be ooh, hours, since I last had one of those." Melene cheekily rubbed a furry thigh against the galago.
But Fluff had an answer for her. "Alas, señorita, I should love to oblige, but I am entirely out of candy."
Fal nearly fell off the trailer laughing.