It was three hours after sunset before all was quiet above. From comm talk she had listened in on, Gweanvin gathered the Grannies were claiming an overwhelming victory, which was not surprising. Thanks to the rules under which they fought, the Lonnies and Grannies were usually so evenly matched in combat that any unanticipated success or failure could set a trend that would hold throughout a battle. And Gweanvin's victory at the very outset, from which she had emerged vitriolically alive though discomfited, was more than enough to carry the day.
She was mildly pleased by this. As she had told General Dargow, a main reason she wanted to get into the war was to keep as many Primgranese Guardsmen as possible alive to return to duty in the Commonality. If that entailed killing Lonnies before they could kill her Grannies, so be it.
The annoying thing was that she still had not the slightest idea how to get those vac-skull Guardsmen to stop this stupidity and go home. Why bother keeping them alive just to waste themselves playing bang-bang-you're-dead?
She spent most of her hours of burial trying to think of a plan. She had been told to get a first-hand acquaintance with the Jopat situation, and formulate a scheme based on that direct knowledge. So she tried to formulate. The result was a big empty zero.
The damned barbs were where they wanted to be, doing what they wanted to do. And they knew what their duties in the Commonality were like—that their little game here was a war much more to their taste than the econo-war.
And though she called them stupid, she knew they were not weak-minded. They knew what they liked—that was for sure. And nobody was going to trick them into thinking they would like something else better when experience told them otherwise.
So . . . what should she do? What could she do?
Not a damned thing.
She sighed finally and returned her attention to her surroundings. All was still above. The battle was over and the barbs had retired.
Slowly she expanded her shieldscreen, employing it as an earthmover. The debris yielded stubbornly with creaks and scrapings as she poured power into the screen. The surface of the mound bulged up. Rocks and tree trunks rolled and toppled down its sides, and the bulge pushed up still higher. Finally an opening appeared at the top and Gweanvin, semi-inert, squirted herself through it, the hole collapsing back as she lifted above the dark treetops and streaked northward.
When she reached the Green-Ten camp she dropped quietly to the ground, hoping the barbs had left her some supper. More than food was waiting for her. Her arrival triggered a celebration, in the loud, tumultuous barb style, that lasted into the morning hours. She was hugged, kissed, fondled and fed until she nearly turned on her shieldscreen in self-defense.
General Dargow came shortly before midnight to bestow the Best in Battle award for the day on her. After that brief interruption, the party resumed. And Gweanvin had to admit it was fun.
But a similar shindig, following the next battle three night later, was too much of a repetition to be quite so enjoyable. The barbs of Green-Ten were even more delirious than before. They were carried away by the glory of their cute little snip of a sniper taking two Best in Battle awards in a row!
The battle itself had not developed quite the same as the first. The Lonnies had sent no anti-sniper patrols forward in the Green-Ten sector, and when fighting had begun to develop elsewhere Gweanvin and the others along the line had been allowed to advance in search of the enemy. She found them, to their regret.
The third time she saw action, the Lonnies hit the Green-Ten sector with a sudden massive assault; no preliminaries. Gweanvin had halfway anticipated that tactic, and with Surants' prior approval had never perched at all. She kept walking and crawling south throughout the long midday waiting period without benefit of life-support. When the Lonnies struck, she was far enough behind their front elements to bob up unexpectedly in their midst, where she had a lone-hand advantage similar to, though not as great as, that in her space encounter on the day of her arrival. She created confusion and havoc while vaporizing one Lonnie and lancing at least five more before she caught a lance through the right shoulder and had to stage a zig-zag-zogging retreat northward.
Another Best in Battle award, and another celebration.
She was transferred to command of a twelve-man assault squad in Purple-Eighteen. Training a whole week for that new assignment, she missed two battles.
Back in action with her shoulder totally healed, she demanded no less from her squadmen than she did from herself. They did not come through brilliantly in her opinion, and she let them know it. But they drew the crowd in four successive engagements, with resulting Granny victories.
Then General Dargow called a staff meeting and ordered Gweanvin to be present. The assembled officers sat in a natural amphitheater near Battle Headquarters, studying the half-chagrined emo-pattern of the general as he stood up to face them.
"I've had comm with General Brastig of the Lonnies," he announced. "He wants a parley, to consider rules revisions. I'm inclined to agree with him."
"What the hell for, chief?" someone in the crowd called out. "Because the game's got one-sided, that's what for!"
This brought silence. Gweanvin could read the concern of the barbs around her. Maybe the econo-war was not their game, but the basic philosophy of it—that competition is an end in itself and must never be allowed to decay by becoming uneven—was something they understood. It was great to win battles, but winning a war was as unthinkable as losing one.
"We got good rules!" a rumbling voice objected. "Them Lonnies oughta get theirselves a Gweanvin of their own, if they want the sides evened up."
Gweanvin blinked. Damn! Was this business of changing the rules all on account of her?
After a moment of thought, she realized it was. It had not occurred to her before that in a bloody fight with close to a million barbs engaged on each side, her own escapades, award-winning though they were, could make that much difference.
Dargow was answering the rumbler: "I guess they would like to. But the Federation hasn't sent a Gweanvin out to try to bring them home—if the Fed's got Gweanvin's equal, which I doubt. Now, what I want us to do is figure out some rules changes that will give the Lonnies a better break without hampering ourselves too much. That way we can go to the parley with—"
"Hold it, general!" yelled Gweanvin, leaping to her feet.
He stared questioningly at her. "Leave your silly rules alone," she told him. "I've said all along that this is a little game you yaps are playing, and I see now I wasn't kidding! It's too damned little for me to fit in. You can count me out—because I'm going home!"
Bellows of protest roared from the officers. Gweanvin stood unswayed, her chin jutting with determination. And despite the yells, she could read a growing agreement in the crowd, and also in Dargow, that her departure would be the best answer—better than tampering with the rules. Soon the protests died away.
"What about your mission?" asked the general.
She spat an obscenity. "I'll tell the desk-riders back home where to shove their mission."
"Damn it, Gweanvin," Nathel Gromon spoke up. "I hate to see you get pushed out of the game."
"Don't bawl about it," she told him. "This is a boring war you're having, and I've been playing just to kill time while I tried to formulate a plan. I've had a bellyful, thank you." She turned slowly to glance over the sobered faces. "So long, meatheads." She grinned at them. "Good shooting!"
She went semi-inert and streaked up through the trees. For a moment she thought of going by her squad's camp to tell her men goodbye in person, but she decided to hell with it. She soared on up through the atmosphere and into the vacuum of space, her breathing going on internal mode.
Once in clear vacuum, she set a vector for Prima Gran and went into warp. Only then did she contact headquarters.
"GO to HQ SA-Forty."
"Yes, Gweanvin. Smitwak here."
"Chalk up one flop to the cute little broad," she gritted. "It was a stinking mission to start with, and I'd like to get on mentacomm just once with the wise guys who dreamed it up!"
"You can't, Gweanvin. They're off the Bauble network. Security, you know."
Gweanvin grunted. Smitwak often took a remark literally when caught unawares. "Never mind," she sighed. "Just tell them I'm coming in, mission unaccomplished."
"Okay. Win some, lose some. That's life, Gweanvin."
"Thanks for the platitudes," she snarled. "I'll quote you in my memoirs. Out."
"Don't kick yourself all the way home." Smitwak said. "Frankly, you kept working on this one longer than I expected you to. You have great perseverance. Out."
Smitwak's solicitude was unnecessary. Gweanvin had no intention of blaming herself for the failure of the mission. When the directors of the Special Assignments Bureau misfigured as badly as they had on this one, the fault did not lie with the operative in the field. The directors had flubbed, and she looked forward to telling them so.
But now, with five days of warpflight ahead of her, she relaxed. Soon she was in the space traveler's semi-doze—a hibernative state that could eat up the light-years with minimal awareness of time's passage. Every ten hours she would rouse long enough to swallow a food-concentrate pill and check on the progress of her journey. Then she would slide back into dormancy.
"HQ SA-Forty to GO."
The call snapped her alert when she was three days out from Jopat.
"Okay, Smitty, I'm awake. What is it?"
"Bard Lustempo will tell you. Here he is."
Lustempo was one of the Bureau's directors. Gweanvin's lip curled. If that guy tried to give her a song and dance—or send her back to Jopat . . .
"Miss Oster," came Lustempo's voice. "I wanted the pleasure of giving you the good news personally. Your mission was a success. The Guardsmen are returning. Dargow, reported their departure from Jopat twelve minutes ago. Congratulations are in order. Miss Oster."
"But . . . but . . ." Gweanvin sputtered. "The mission flopped!"
"By no means," the director assured her jovially. "It went essentially as we expected."
"But I never even figured out a plan," she protested. "If those lumpybrains are coming home, it's because they finally got as bored with their little game as I got in three weeks—not because of any plot of mine!"
"Precisely, Miss Oster. And why do you suppose they got bored?"
"You asked that question for the pleasure of answering it yourself," she told him evenly, "so go ahead."
Lustempo chuckled. "I will. Our Guardsmen fought one battle following your departure and discovered the excitement you brought to their game was gone. Also, there was some business about changing the rules to accommodate your presence. That helped bring home the point to them—a point they could not be TOLD convincingly, but had to be shown. I refer, of course, to the limited scope and interest of their game . . . in short, to its littleness."
"It was too little for me," she said.
"Correct. And despite the shortcomings of the econo-war from the viewpoint of the genetic barbarians, Miss Oster, you convinced them by your actions rather than by words that any competition in which you participated had to hold more excitement than a competition that excluded you. In short, Miss Oster, they want to be in your war."
"Oh . . . then I wasn't expected to come up with a scheme at all," she replied thoughtfully. "That was just your way of getting me to hang around Jopat and—and play their game for a while."
"Yes. Some situations, Miss Oster, are not really soluble by plot alone. This is a lesson that should be well learned by those who seek to direct the activities of others. No scheme we—or you—might have formulated could have overcome the stubborn determination of the Guardsmen and brought them home willingly. That situation had to be resolved by allowing the persons involved to pursue their natural inclinations. Our formulation was thus one of selection of a person or persons to inject into the situation to bring about the desired resolution. Thus we saw to it you became involved in the Guardsmen's game—and allowed events to take their course."
"Nice of you."
"While you are not an overly modest person, Miss Oster," the director continued, "I wonder if you realize the powerfully catalytic effect you tend to have in all matters in which you . . ."
Gweanvin yawned. That was the way of desk-riders like Lustempo—jabber-jabber-jabber! Well, maybe they needed to talk a lot as a substitute for action. Old Lustempo's praise of her, which was still droning on in her ear, was really patting himself and his Bureau colleagues on the back for being so clever in sending her to Jopat.
Well . . . It had been pretty bright of them, at that.
She yawned again, keyed herself to rouse and say "thank you" when Lustempo finally unwound, and dozed off.