Starship Troopers

"Not now, sir. But that's how we got lost. We tangled with a bunch of them... and when it was over, we were turned around."

I started to ask about casualties, then decided that bad news could wait; I wanted to get my platoon together and get out of there. A Bug town with no Bugs in sight was somehow more upsetting than the Bugs we had expected to encounter. Brumby coached us through the next two choices and I tossed tanglefoot bombs down each corridor we did not use. "Tanglefoot" is a derivative of the nerve gas we had been using on Bugs in the past—instead of killing, it gives any Bug that trots through it a sort of shaking palsy. We had been equipped with it for this one operation, and I would have swapped a ton of it for a few pounds of the real stuff. Still, it might protect our flanks.

In one long stretch of tunnel I lost touch with Brumby -- some oddity in reflection of radio waves, I guess, for I picked him up at the next intersection.

But there he could not tell me which way to turn. This was the place, or near the place, where the Bugs had hit them.

And here the Bugs hit us.

I don't know where they came from. One instant everything was quiet.

Then I heard the cry of "Bugs! Bugs!" from back of me in the column, I turned -- and suddenly Bugs were everywhere. I suspect that those smooth walls are not as solid as they look; that's the only way I can account for the way they were suddenly all around us and among us.

We couldn't use flamers, we couldn't use bombs; we were too likely to hit each other. But the Bugs didn't have any such compunctions among themselves if they could get one of us. But we had hands and we had feet—

It couldn't have lasted more than a minute, then there were no more Bugs, just broken pieces of them on the door... and four cap troopers down.

One was Sergeant Brumby, dead. During the ruckus the second section had rejoined. They had been not far away, sticking together to keep from getting further lost in that maze, and had heard the fight. Hearing it, they had been able to trace it by sound, where they had not been able to locate us by radio.

Cunha and I made certain that our casualties were actually dead, then consolidated the two sections into one of four squads and down we went -- and found the Bugs that had our platoon sergeant besieged.

That fight didn't last any time at all, because he had warned me what to expect. He had captured a brain Bug and was using its bloated body as a shield. He could not get out, but they could not attack him without (quite literally) committing suicide by hitting their own brain.

We were under no such handicap; we hit them from behind.

Then I was looking at the horrid thing he was holding and I was feeling exultant despite our losses, when suddenly I heard close up that "frying bacon" noise. A big piece of roof fell on me and Operation Royalty was over as far as I was concerned.

I woke up in bed and thought that I was back at O. C. S. and had just had a particularly long and complicated Bug nightmare. But I was not at O. C. S.; I was in a temporary sickbay of the transport Argonne, and I really had had a platoon of my own for nearly twelve hours.

But now I was just one more patient, suffering from nitrous oxide poisoning and overexposure to radiation through being out of armor for over an hour before being retrieved, plus broken ribs and a knock in the head which had put me out of action.

It was a long time before I got everything straight about Operation Royalty and some of it I'll never know. Why Brumby took his section underground, for example. Brumby is dead and Naidi bought the farm next to his and I'm simply glad that they both got their chevrons and were wearing them that day on Planet P when nothing went according to plan.

I did learn, eventually, why my platoon sergeant decided to go down into that Bug town. He had heard my report to Captain Blackstone that the "major breakthrough" was actually a feint, made with workers sent up to be slaughtered. When real warrior Bugs broke out where he was, he had concluded (correctly and minutes sooner than Staff reached the same conclusion) that the Bugs were making a desperation push, or they would not expend their workers simply to draw our fire.

He saw that their counterattack made from Bug town was not in sufficient force, and concluded that the enemy did not have many reserves— and decided that, at this one golden moment, one man acting alone might have a chance of raiding, finding "royalty" and capturing it. Remember, that was the whole purpose of the operation; we had plenty of force simply to sterilize Planet P, but our object was to capture royalty castes and to learn how to go down in. So he tried it, snatched that one moment—and succeeded on both counts.